4 ms·

Why do you think it’s not consistent? You don’t have to apply the same policies to everything you use.

• lapcat 8mo ago
  > You don’t have to apply the same policies to everything you use. What's the reasoning behind it, though? You can arbitrarily apply different policies to different things, but there's no rhyme or reason to that. If the difference ultimately comes down to trusting certain developers to an extent that you don't need to audit their source, then I'm not sure why that couldn't also be true of certain extension developers.
  • mixmastamyk 8mo ago
    Linux distros have a good reputation, browser extensions don’t. Might be simple as that.
    • lapcat 8mo ago
      It appears that you may have misunderstood the preceding discussion. Linux is open source and thus can be audited.
      • mixmastamyk 8mo ago
        One might choose not to however, yet still audit their extensions.
      • notpushkin 8mo ago
        One benefit that FOSS provides is that there’s more eyeballs on the source code, so yeah, it’s a very strong trust signal. But sometimes priorities are a bit different, and ultimately you need to trust something. IMO it still makes sense to personally vet browser extensions and trust the OS/browser: 1. It’s hard to create a new operating system or browser, so we don’t see many new ones. (Not taking into account Firefox forks / Chromium reskins here.) For browser extensions, the entry barrier is much lower, and the chance that one of them will be malicious is higher. 2. It’s also much harder to audit all of Linux, or Firefox/Chromium, especially if you’re not too familiar with the domain. For browser extensions on the other hand, it’s usually possible to go through them in one night.