Installing Every* Firefox Extension
jack.cab191 points by RohanAdwankar 6 hours ago
191 points by RohanAdwankar 6 hours ago
Sad that no real pages can load successfully, but I thoroughly enjoyed the writing.
> We turned on crash reporting on the way.
I haven't burst out laughing like this in a while! You'll probably make for some horror stories to a poor Mozilla team.
This article is wonderful crazy.
The icing on the cake is the discovery of a potential performance bug in one or more of the about: pages, that's definitely worthy of following up.
I'm laughing so hard at the video, I imagine this is what browsing the web is like for the elderly that barely know how to use a computer. Can someone do this in Chrome?
My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
Maybe it was this?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-...
If you turn loose a completely untrained person to click yes/accept/download/OK/I agree on every type of user interface popup, particularly a person who has no ability to distinguish between a user interface question presented by the operating system itself and something inside of a browser window, that's what you'll get...
I’m aware, that’s exactly what my grandfathers (rest in peace grandpa, I miss you) IE window looked and felt like in the early 2010s!
I have a vivid memory of once looking over someone's shoulder in the IE days and being horrified to see toolbars taking up about 80% of the available screen real estate, leaving only maybe 150-200 pixels of vertical space for actual web browsing. I have no idea how they got anything done, and my guess was they never actually used any of the installed toolbars and just thought that was normal.
"I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid."
I geel this on a deep personal level.
> I did some research to find why this took so long. 13 years ago, extensions.json used to be extensions.sqlite. Nowadays, extensions.json is serialized and rewritten in full on every write debounced to 20 ms, which works fine for 15 extensions but not 84,194.
Occasionally, databases are useful. ;)
This is probably a good example of the opposite. It would be a mistake to design for the fleetingly rare case. If you’re dealing with a handful of extensions, a json file that’s rewritten is fine.
But the software already has multiple database systems built in. There's not exactly overhead to use what plumbing is already there, instead of writing to disk.
In an ideal world, software with 100 million users would be optimised for energy usage. It all adds up. This does pale in comparison to everything else, though.
Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?
Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
"In terms of implementation, the most interesting one is “Іron Wаllеt” (the I, a, and e are Cyrillic). Three seconds after install, it fetches the phishing page’s URL from the first record of a NocoDB spreadsheet and opens it [...] The API key had write access, so I wiped the spreadsheet."
The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
Dang this is so good. Well done.
In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...
https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...
> It turns out there’s only 84 thousand Firefox extensions.
On addons.mozilla.org, but you can distribute Firefox extensions without posting on addons.mozilla.org. I do.
Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
