alt Hacker News"Random" is a funny thing to call an extension that you have deliberately installed.
I also don't want "random" programs accessing my home folder. That would be terrible! Who knows what programs that could be! I do however want the very specific programs that I have intentionally installed to be able to access my home folder easily. Same for extensions.
The goal here isn't really to protect me from extensions. Extensions don't do anything on their own, they just sit there and wait for me to install them. So the goal is apparently to protect me from me (installing an extension), which really is to say protect their business (ads) from me (blocking them).
"Random" is what I call pretty much every extension that is not uBlock Origin. I absolutely want them limited to the fullest extent. Maybe if they were, I would actually install some of them.
> I do however want the very specific programs that I have intentionally installed to be able to access my home folder easily.
I don't. My standard operating practice is to virtualize them.
My security posture is considerably more lax towards free and open source software, for obvious reasons, and even then this trust only extends to the software in my Linux distribution's repositories. Stuff coming from PyPI, npm, cargo, ruby gems, and other such "developer centric" repositories get the full virtualization treatment. If it's easy for randoms to publish packages, then it's equally easy for malware to make it in.