All those extensions probably crashed the crash reporter
xnorswap 11 hours 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.
gathered 11 hours 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?
stratos123 10 hours ago [-]
My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
It's inline. Search the page for (and heed): epilepsy warning
walrus01 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 2 minutes ago [-]
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 hours 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 6 hours 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!
"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.
mid-kid 2 hours ago [-]
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...
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.
curioussquirrel 57 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely unhinged and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing!
codemog 5 hours ago [-]
I love the small few who take the time to do crazy stuff like this. Very entertaining.
mmsc 2 hours ago [-]
The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.
fulNamSexBoomer 1 hours ago [-]
This obviously showcases that Firefox needs to work on their support for having all browser extensions at once. Users want and need this.
layer8 10 hours ago [-]
> 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. ;)
Waterluvian 10 hours ago [-]
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.
shakna 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Chaosvex 2 hours ago [-]
Firefox is absolutely abysmal at not corrupting its JSON stores, too. I've had it crash and lose tabs so many times. Perhaps moving back to SQLite wouldn't be a bad idea.
I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.
mockingloris 1 hours ago [-]
> I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.
@Chaosvex curious how you did that.
estimator7292 7 hours ago [-]
Easier for a user to edit.
7 hours ago [-]
HPsquared 9 hours ago [-]
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.
9 hours ago [-]
ryanisnan 11 hours ago [-]
Dang this is so good. Well done.
proactivesvcs 10 hours ago [-]
"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."
methodist 9 hours ago [-]
The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
thephyber 3 hours ago [-]
Did you just admit to a CFAA violation?
weird-eye-issue 2 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "you"? Do you know what quotes are?
sunaookami 1 hours ago [-]
Won't someone think of the poor phishers!
3abiton 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
walrus01 9 hours ago [-]
In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98
> 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.
tech234a 5 hours ago [-]
Other examples I recall when looking into this: Zotero browser connector for Firefox, Chrome Remote Desktop for Firefox (I think it adds a few features for connections to remote desktops)
youknownothing 7 hours ago [-]
Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?
throwatdem12311 8 hours ago [-]
Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
thegdsks 9 hours ago [-]
Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
Rendered at 09:44:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I quickly wrote up how: https://www.arnevogel.com/firefox-permissions/
> 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.
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...
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-metal-...
Chrome Web Store has something similar: https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap
And Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/sitemap.xml
I geel this on a deep personal level.
[1]: https://www.letsgameitout.tv/
Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.
Occasionally, databases are useful. ;)
I had to recover somebody's bookmarks for them recently after it decided to destroy the main copy.
@Chaosvex curious how you did that.
This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...
https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...
On addons.mozilla.org, but you can distribute Firefox extensions without posting on addons.mozilla.org. I do.