Comments on: The Future of Firefox Extensions: Make Them More Like Web Apps

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:38:17 +0000

Basil,

I’ve always felt that extensions with binary components should be treated differently, much as device drivers are treated differently from normal apps (requiring digital signatures, root password, etc.). Special terms of service are a good idea.

By: Basil Hashem

Basil Hashem — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:39:28 +0000

I agree that a two-tier or capabilities-based sandbox model would be great for Firefox. In fact, one of the problems on the AMO site is deciding how to deal with binary extensions. On the one hand, they are powerful because they use “extended functions” but their opaqueness prevents AMO Editors from being able to make any claims about their authorship, privacy, etc… AMO editors can only black box test this portion of an add-on. If we had a way to indicate that an add-on is running with lower privileges it would help us tremendously in raising our confidence around sharing it with a broad audience.

(FYI, for binary components, we are considering asking add-on devs to agree to an additional terms of service agreement when being hosted on AMO).

By: Gary Johnson

Gary Johnson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:58:12 +0000

I care not a whit for extension install without restart.
It would be nice if extension developers worked together and released products with more functionality.
Whatever your feelings about security, you have to trust what you install. I think we don’t pay enough attention to the trust model of identification and authentication. Its hard and risky to implement. As soon as its done, someone will break a piece of it, but its a lot better than what we have.

By: Matthew Gertner

Matthew Gertner — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:40:39 +0000

Mark,

I don’t see any reason not to allow overlays with standard syntax for chrome integration. Is this a security risk in itself? In my imagination the sandboxed extensions would only be able to access XPCOM through safe FUEL interfaces, and would naturally have no binary components, but other than that they would keep all the capabilities of today’s extensions.

By: Mark Finkle

Mark Finkle — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:33:08 +0000

Following through with this idea – Where would the sandboxed locations exist around the browser chrome? How would main menu / context menu / toolbar integration work? Would overlays still be allowed at all?

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:31:28 +0000

For me, extensions aren’t exactly a killer feature for Firefox, just a useful way of adding improvements. I understand some people have hundreds of them installed, but for me, Firebug and Flashblock are the only ones I really need. The former for doing my job, the latter for making the web usable.

Incidentally, the latter really ought to be a core feature, in my opinion. Nothing fancy like white/black lists (an actual extension could extend it to support that), just the ability to suppress use of a plugin (flash, java, whatever) on a page until the user clicks on the control to activate it.

By: prot

prot — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:22:17 +0000

It might be worthwhile to one first run have three tabs open –> Welcome to FF which large introductions to add-on || AMO home page (= Most popular add-ons) || person’s home page.
–I’m sure a lot of people don’t even know what add-ons are!