HackerNews

Installing every* Firefox extension

jack.cab
RohanAdwankar
2 days ago
665points
80 comments

Comments

ArneVogel•2 days ago
I won the "Middle Finger Emoji Sticker" Award! (https://jack.cab/blog/every-firefox-extension#the-middle-fin...)

I quickly wrote up how: https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/

benlimanto•yesterday
At least you put effort into it and break it.

Yet Dr.B extension keep balooning and getting crazier day by day!

Now as I write this, it has 97 extensions from prior 84 extension

Man, how many slop will he keep putting out there.

thehias•yesterday
why dont you use your own extension?
ArneVogel•yesterday
I used it on my old pc, but I don't buy still that regularly online so I guess I forgot to reinstall it again. Also it is outdated by now as the domain list hasn't updated in two years.
BoppreH•2 days 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.

tech234a•2 days ago
Firefox crash reports are public though unfortunately I was unable to find their crashes: https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/

EDIT: if they still have the profile they can actually find the crash ID for their crash report: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-cr...

RobotToaster•2 days ago
All those extensions probably crashed the crash reporter
gathered•2 days ago
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?
m132•yesterday
Loved the brutal realization that came when the seemingly broken Extensions button the author was mashing for solid 30 seconds turned out to be a fake, extension-supplied one. One... of three.
stratos123•2 days ago
My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
Evidlo•2 days ago
Maybe it was this?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-...

robotnikman•yesterday
This gives me an idea for an extension similar to this mod but for Firefox, for those who are insane enough to try it: 1/10000 Chance for Withered Foxy Jumpscare Every Second

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=34819...

nullify88•2 days ago
This will make a good office prank for those that leave their desktops unlocked and unattended.
lucasmullens•yesterday
For some reason that metal pipe sound was a meme a few years ago, a picture of a pipe and that sound has 5 million views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDLmYZ5HqgM
xg15•yesterday
There was also a nice dramatic arc to it, with the browser first (seemingly) behaving normally, then starting with a few scattered theme switches, then going increasingly off the rails as more and more extensions start up.

Also the metal pipe.

amelius•2 days ago
That will be one hell of a bug report.
walrus01•2 days ago
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...
RussianCow•2 days ago
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.
walthamstow•yesterday
You can see this today on macOS. I see people with this at work all the time. The defaults have quite inflated scaling and the dock at the bottom. The vertical space left for a website after the address bar is hardly anything.
weird-eye-issue•2 days ago
I have this memory too lol. I was really quite young but it's like a core memory. Similar to when a middle school teacher told me about Firefox and I discovered tabs.
girvo•2 days ago
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!
abustamam•yesterday
I was recently doing some maintenance on my mom's iPhone SE and was quite shocked at how many random apps she had installed. Random forums, shopping apps, etc. Bespoke mobile app wrappers for simple web apps may be the new 'toolbar' or 'browser extension'
Shadowmist•yesterday
You can just say AI
Eddy_Viscosity2•2 days ago
Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.
rented_mule•2 days ago
It's inline. Search the page for (and heed): epilepsy warning
xg15•yesterday
Also enable sound. I think that video might even be better to listen to than to watch it...
xnorswap•2 days ago
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.

xg15•yesterday
> 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.

I'm slightly worried how they arrived at that debounce value. Which extensions need to write to extensions.json continuously, several times a second?

Someone•yesterday
I don’t think extensions ever write that file; Firefox writes it whenever its in-memory set of installed extensions is updated.

When Firefox finds new extensions, it updates the in-memory set for each of them.

In the typical case that series of updates will be small, and the denounce makes it likely the file gets written only once.

tech234a•2 days ago
Alternatively you may be able to list the extensions using the sitemap: https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xml

Chrome Web Store has something similar: https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap

And Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml

username135•2 days ago
"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.

cachius•2 days ago
Reminds me of the NPM package that depended es on all other NPM packages https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/
m132•yesterday
Brings back the memories of using Internet Explorer when every other installer was fighting for toolbar space!

Every Internet café had at least 2, with Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and later on, Bing being the main contenders.

mmsc•2 days ago
The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.