201–210 of 320 posts
What was funny to me is the fact the Facebook started to revert my posts when using this. I remember recording a video about it, don't know if i still have it though.
I think extensions should declare a bunch of CSS selectors that they need data access to, and if an element doesn't match those selectors, then all attributes and .innerText/.innerHTML should return undefined.
I don't care if normal people can't understand what CSS selectors are. Just hide it in "view technical details" box or something.
I think what we need the most is a "view source" for browser extensions installed from the store: make it easy to view the source and to extract the browser extension into a folder. Make it easy to find out which web pages they access and which they modified. Minimized/encrypted code in extensions should be forbidden. It should be very easy to read the code. E.g. this extensions says "records user activity", but what…
In chrome go to chrome://extensions, enable developer mode, and now you can view source for any extension in devtools. The content scripts are already available in the regular web page's devtools without enabling developer mode. The total list of websites is available in the installation popup for the extension. The chrome web store already bans code obfuscation. minification is allowed as there's no meaningful way t…
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What Russian messages?
06/07/2016 and 10/30/2017, and 11/22/2018, I think there may be one or two more but I am too lazy. cool idea to publish those. i remember when the pirate bay was publishing takedown notices in a special, public, category
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> Most browser extensions by weight are Google Chrome extensions. Google Chrome is unambiguously demonstrating that no API is safe in its quest to juice revenues. Anybody who builds extensions using Chrome's APIs should be very aware that they're quite possibly putting effort into something a juggernaut will stomp away without a second thought. How unlike developing for literally any other environment.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic. There's a spectrum between developing for Lua (juggernaut is super friendly), Python (juggernaut is mostly friendly, even if 2->3 caused a lot of casualties), Go (in spite of the corporate backer, quite careful about not stomping) and Chrome. Yes, there's always a counter-party. My point is it saves a lot of later grief to consider up front the counter-party you're entering int…
Google has removed capabilities for certain categories and it's pretty easy to figure out what's going to be risky.
But I use a set of very useful extensions, none of which present any problem to Google, all of which are extremely useful, and all of which I expect to stick around.
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I honestly can't imagine not using extensions. I'm 39 and have been on the web since Netscape etc in the early 90s and I honestly care more about the extensions than I do anything the browser actually does. Like, if there were no extensions I don't think I'd care at all if I used Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. But Chrome and Firefox have this massive, massive ecosystem of productitivy improving extensions. I'll give an…
Hello. I used to use Dark Reader but then some it changed hands and a very questionable update appeared and freaked many people out, so I uninstalled. IIRC the changes were removed, or the additional code was not correctly activated, maybe both. Anyway, you may wish to check the status of that particular extension. I use some flag in config now to do approximately the same thing, it’s not as effective, but it’s close…
Post author here! I wrote this post five years ago. Since then, my conviction in the value of customizable software has only grown, but I've also updated my thinking in a few ways: 1) AI AI is rapidly getting better at coding. Current AI is often bad at high-level architecture but is capable of making small local tweaks. Seems like a good fit for the kind of code you need to write a browser extension! I'm exploring t…
The security problem of open platforms is the key. Anything that is open enough to let someone who knows what they're doing customize the system to their liking, will also be abused by bad actors persuading people who don't know what they are doing to customize the system in ways that harm them. The fact I can write my own custom keyboards on Android is great! But the fact someone can convince your grandparents to in…
Adding either of those entitlements to a keyboard app should require extremely scary dialogs. Needs to be possible - perhaps you want your password manager with sync to be part of the keyboard app - but it's clearly a huge risk.
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There is already a permission system?
The issue the parent is trying to solve is you don't really have fine grained enough control, or apps nag you and won't load until you give them everything they want. My mom has a cheap camera security app that allows me to see the live streams from remote. Every single time I open the app it asks me again if I want to allow it access to my local network. The answer is a resounding "no". If I could just say "fake yes…
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There is already a permission system?
The issue the parent is trying to solve is you don't really have fine grained enough control, or apps nag you and won't load until you give them everything they want. My mom has a cheap camera security app that allows me to see the live streams from remote. Every single time I open the app it asks me again if I want to allow it access to my local network. The answer is a resounding "no". If I could just say "fake yes…
From what I can tell, internet access is the default just to allow apps to have advertising. Too cynical?
Android originally could deny internet access to Apps which I found useful.
Certainly I don't want an extension or plugin to have pull access to the internet. That may limit functionality. But often only push is needed (e.g. blocking list could be pushed). No third-party keyboard should have internet access.
Edit: rewrote a little clearer.