Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it? Has the browser extension landscape changed significantly since then?
Whatever happened to manifest v3?
mv3 is already referenced in the article (second link), but it's still not mandated yet.
Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
21–30 of 320 posts
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#22Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#23I love the idea of browser extensions but they don’t appear to be worth the security/privacy risk for my use cases. I wonder how many others are like me and too paranoid to risk extensions at all?
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#24Many popular browser extensions were bought up by data brokers that use them to exfiltrate browser history, so not sure if they’re underrated, I think you have to be pretty careful as the extension security/privacy model is/was pretty awful. I e.g. know screenshotting extensions (Awesome Screenshot) that would vacuum up your browser history and send it to a data broker in Israel. So probably better to have that as a native browser feature.
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#25> Browser extensions remind us what it’s like to have deep control over how we use our computers. Uh. Linux users would like a word here. But more generally, there's a significant component of this that seems isomorphous to the question I was trying to discuss in a post I wrote several years ago called "Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?" There seems to be much more excitement about ways to "hack…
> Uh. Linux users would like a word here.
As a Linux user, I disagree. It's not quite the same. Yes, I could recompile my kernel if I wanted to. I can recompile most of userspace too. But it's a hassle, especially if you want to diverge from upstream, and maintain that divergence on a long-term basis.
You can do some fun hacks with LD_PRELOAD et al, but it's nowhere near the degree of flexibility and ease of access of browser extensions.
I am allowed to modify all the software as I see fit (and that's excellent), but the friction of actually doing so is (comparatively) high.
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#26I quite like bookmarklets, easy to write. Tried a userscript but couldn't get into it. Never tried an extension, wouldn't know where to start.
Start with ChatGPT or a sample extension.
The unfortunate part of web browser extensions is that, like the treadmill of web frameworks and app development, browsers can’t seem to stop changing and tweaking how extensions work and remove perfectly good functionality. So you end up sometimes having to rewrite an extension or its manifest with very little assistance from browser makers. But at least you don’t need to learn XUL any longer, so not all changes are bad ;-)
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#27> Browser extensions remind us what it’s like to have deep control over how we use our computers. Uh. Linux users would like a word here. But more generally, there's a significant component of this that seems isomorphous to the question I was trying to discuss in a post I wrote several years ago called "Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?" There seems to be much more excitement about ways to "hack…
I think people see extensions as a way to bypass code signing, distribution, and brand building.
So chrome (or whatever) becomes a platform for distributing and executing software.
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#28I quite like bookmarklets, easy to write. Tried a userscript but couldn't get into it. Never tried an extension, wouldn't know where to start.
Check out Firefox examples on github, you’ll like it, I’ve had great experience learning from them to add nifty features to my browser:
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#29I wish browser extensions had more fine-grained permissions but it's a tricky problem verifying if software is using permissions maliciously (see the Obfuscated C Code Contest and the Underhand C Contest) and how to communicate nuanced permissions to users (most users don't read and/or understand tech stuff, and can be easily mislead).
A tip in Chrome that I never see mentioned if you want to be extra safe when trying extensions:
- Go to Profiles > Add profile > Continue without account
- Install any extensions you feel like in this profile and they're completely isolated from the tabs logins, history, cookies and so on in your regular profile. Similarly, you can run Chrome Beta or Chrome Canary for installing extensions into, alongside regular Chrome.
E.g. you can install 10s of potentially risky web development extensions into this profile (they usually need a lot of access to do what they need to do), and keep them sandboxed away from the profile where you do your personal banking or login to work websites.
It's not practical for every extension, but I do this for my web development stuff and only use a couple of extensions for personal stuff.
I sell a browser extension where the permission I really want to ask for is "can only observe the network traffic it sends/receives in its own tabs" but I'm lumped with having to ask for the "read and write all your data" permission, but I make sure to share the above tip in the description (shameless plug: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/checkbot-seo-web-sp...).
Re: Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
#30> Browser extensions remind us what it’s like to have deep control over how we use our computers. Uh. Linux users would like a word here. But more generally, there's a significant component of this that seems isomorphous to the question I was trying to discuss in a post I wrote several years ago called "Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?" There seems to be much more excitement about ways to "hack…
> Uh. Linux users would like a word here. As a Linux user, I disagree. It's not quite the same. Yes, I could recompile my kernel if I wanted to. I can recompile most of userspace too. But it's a hassle, especially if you want to diverge from upstream, and maintain that divergence on a long-term basis. You can do some fun hacks with LD_PRELOAD et al, but it's nowhere near the degree of flexibility and ease of access o…
I feel gentoo reduces that hassle a fair amount since you can just toss the patches in and the distro pulls them in on updates. So long as you're not messing with APIs it's not too bad in terms of bitrot.
... I suppose you could do the same thing with debian too. You'd just need to maintain an overlay repo that rebuilds off the upstream deb sources for the packages you touched.
At that point you're pretty much doing the same thing distro's volunteer maintainer is doing. Take an upstream package, add tweaks, rebuild them automatically with tweaks on the next upstream release.