Installing Every* Firefox Extension(jack.cab)
167 pointsby RohanAdwankar5 hours ago12 comments
  • BoppreH2 hours 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.

  • xnorswap4 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.

  • gathered4 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?
    • stratos1233 hours ago
      My favorite part was the metal pipe sound effect. Wish the author investigated which extension does that.
    • Eddy_Viscosity24 hours ago
      Where is the video, I scanned through and only saw still images.
    • walrus012 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...
      • RussianCow2 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.
  • username1354 hours 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.

  • youknownothing33 minutes ago
    Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?
  • throwatdem12311an hour ago
    Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
  • proactivesvcs3 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."
    • methodist2 hours ago
      The extension is actually still up: hxxps://addons[.]mozilla[.]org/en-US/firefox/addon/%D1%96ron-w%D0%B0ll%D0%B5t/
  • ryanisnan4 hours ago
    Dang this is so good. Well done.
  • walrus012 hours ago
    In general concept this reminds me a bit of adding every possible installer .EXE based Internet Explorer browser toolbar to Windows 98

    https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...

    https://fergido.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/too...

  • layer83 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. ;)

    • Waterluvian3 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.
      • shakna2 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.
      • HPsquared3 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.
      • 3 hours ago
        undefined
  • lapcat4 hours ago
    > 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.

  • thegdsks2 hours ago
    Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing