alt Hacker News> I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data
This is so funny to me. Coming from a Netscape Navigator world, when extensions first came out, they were supposed to allow the user to add functionality to websites.
Why would someone install "random extensions" that they dont trust. And also, what would extensions do if not read and write data to websites? .
Sign of the times I guess.
Replies
> Why would someone install "random extensions" that they dont trust.
Same reason why people download random stuff and run it with administrator permissions on Windows.
> Why would someone install "random extensions" that they dont trust.
An extension that you trust today can be sold to an unscrupulous third-party tomorrow. That has happened many many times and will continue to.
Extensions are set to auto update by default, and it's not obvious at first how to disable that. It's also disallowed to install an extension you've built from source on most release builds, without messing with a hex editor. So essentially, any extension you install is liable to be come a "random" extension, if for example, the author sells out, or something like the attacks on NPM were to happen.