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Comments (80)

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  ArneVogel
  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/
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  BoppreH
  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.
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  gathered
  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?
• xnorswap
  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.
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  xg15
  > 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?
• tech234a
  Alternatively you may be able to list the extensions using the sitemap: https://addons.mozilla.org/sitemap.xmlChrome Web Store has something similar: https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemapAnd Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml
• username135
  "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
  Reminds me of the NPM package that depended es on all other NPM packages https://uncenter.dev/posts/npm-install-everything/
• m132
  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
  The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.
• codemog
  I love the small few who take the time to do crazy stuff like this. Very entertaining.
• egeozcan
  In this blog post: Let's Game It Out[1] meets web browsing.[1]: https://www.letsgameitout.tv/
• evolve2k
  I’d like to image with a bit more work, the Firefox core dev team funding this into a CI test and chipping aaay at performance both of Firefox and policies around what goes in the store. Better scanners when extensizoms are unplosded would likely suppprt big gains in removing the poorest quality stuff here and addressing what is leaking memory and is over resource hungry.
• mid-kid
  Seeing this article, and how much webextensions manage to mess up the browser, I'm wondering how bad this experiment would've been with the legacy XUL extensions. Maybe they had a point in getting rid of them...
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  fulNamSexBoomer
  This obviously showcases that Firefox needs to work on their support for having all browser extensions at once. Users want and need this.
• rossdavidh
  My favorite line: "I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid."Not at all; all good developers succeed by finding ways to make their past work look unnecessarily complicated.
• majkinetor
  What is amazing is that Firefox can actually run at all with that many extensions installed.
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  layer8
  > 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. ;)
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  proactivesvcs
  "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."
• ryanisnan
  Dang this is so good. Well done.
• alberto-m
  Really great writing and interesting experiment! I love the small details like the “clueless user”-style crash report in the `about:telemetry` section (“it just crashed out of nowhere”)
• walrus01
  In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...
• xg15
  The eternal tension between "this service mesh is completely overengineered for our usecase" and "our broker is far to slow for our 84.205 microservices"...
• Kholin
  Firefox should provide an option to disable the auto popup pages after any extension installed.
• butterlesstoast
  I got so much joy out of seeing it take 32 gigs of RAM. Bravo.
• danlitt
  Is the scraping code available? (in order to regenerate the dataset later)
• curioussquirrel
  Absolutely unhinged and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing!
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  lapcat
  > 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.
• jason1cho
  This article is interesting but hard to read in certain places because it contains distracting information.Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.
• throwatdem12311
  Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
• youknownothing
  Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?
• anthk
  GNU Abrowser and Icecat both point to a curated list of FLOSS licensed extensions.
• 3abiton
  > Dr. B is the king of slop, with 84 extensions published, all of them vibe coded. > How do I know? Most of their extensions has a README.md in them describing their process of getting these through addon review, and mention Grok 3. Also, not a single one of them have icons or screenshots. > Personally, I’m shocked this number is this low. I expected to see some developers with hundreds!This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?
• thegdsks
  Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
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  6510
  There use to be lots of "handy" programs and toolbars for windows xp and internet explorer. You know, the kind of things no one in their right mind would install. I think people learned to code and wanted to make something?My theory was that if you are going to make something you will at least try to make something useful. The free extra toolbar, context or menu button will need some selling point.So I did what every senseless person would do and started gathering lots and lots of "handy" programs and "tools". I install them one by one and then I try to use them as if I was entirely serious about it.IMHO the important part of the process is to identify useless things early (and convincingly) and get rid of it.Quite a lot of them looked like someone put some real work into it and they all got to stay. It took quite some effort to learn to use all of them the way intended but to my complete surprise some of them were actually useful.Besides google toolbar the only one I remember by name is slickrun[0]. Out of all addons competing for search this one also launched applications and opened folders by typing the first letters of a configured keyword and had a hot key.One truly fabulous tool was an extra windows toolbar button that folded out a context menu with a full blown web directory with 10 layers of nested sub menus. What made it fabulous was the sheer amount of effort someone (or multiple someones) made in organizing and curating thousands of websites into sub sub sub sub menus. Every time I thought (for laughs) I'd try find something there it not just was there but it lived in a very obvious place, surrounded by related stuff worth checking out.I had 3 different spelling and autocomplete tools competing for the best suggestion. IEspel usually won as they send all text input to the server. Most shocking was that if you shifted your hands one character to the right it guessed flawlessly what you wanted to type even if non of the characters were correct. I loaded one with some popular phrases.One of the text complete tools also competed with several clipboard history laboratories.Without a license one could install limited Microsoft desktop buddies[2] but after installing many trial applications that had them I gathered a big team of different ones that were shared between applications. This is important because some tools offered screen reading that worked really well in any application. Being "serous" about the process I carefully configured everything which naturally resulted in configuring trillian reading irc out loud, each user with a different voice and a different desktop buddy. IRC had transformed into theater. I just let it run all day and repeatedly cried from laughter. I couldn't remember all the names but different voices are hard to forget.The context menu of "every firefox extension" was nowhere near as terrible as mine. Mine had arrows to scroll and it kept going.[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20050211033123/https://www.bayde... (the image in the center at the top is the entire ui, one can drag it around and it floats on top of other windows)[2] - https://the-microsoft-windows-xp.fandom.com/wiki/Rover
• redoh
  [dead]