[hajola]

This looks amazing, but installing the Firefox extension I am worried about all the permissions it asks. I am surprised how comfortable people are signing off on these permissions. How do people at HN put these security worries to rest?

[crabbone]

This (your fear) is a result of bad policy by Firefox. This is why a lot of useful add-ons or plugins died, and, overall, Firefox became a shittier browser.

Neither Vimium nor SurfingKeys don't hold a candle to KeySnail because back in the days add-ons worked you could control the browser's chrome as well as a bunch of other non-HTML elements.

Today, you cannot even use browser extensions to close a browser window if the page didn't load in it.

These tools were intended for "power users", who could establish for themselves if the piece of code they want to use is doing something malicious or not. Also being an easy way to extend the browser without a need to recompile it and a need to understand a huge project with a ton of infrastructure... flushed down the drain.

This reminds me about how Alan Key said in one of his interviews that if a motorcycle was invented today, it would've been outlawed right away due to safety concerns.

[hajola]

Auditing each tool by ourselves would cost a lot of time. Not to mention that it would not be a one-time thing. At each update, another check would be required for "peace of mind".

Curious to discuss if there is a way to trust these extensions without establishing ourselves that the code is not harmful.

[crabbone]

But you don't audit it entirely by yourself. Nor were you expected to before. It's the same idea as with other programs or add-ons you use. Don't you use some add-ons in the code editor you use not authored by the authors of the editor itself? And why would you believe the authors of the editor in the first place?

Of course you need to do some due diligence, but it isn't anywhere near as taxing as you seem to think.

Security is worthless if it prevents you from doing useful things. Given a choice between a chance of security breach and not being able to do the useful thing at all, in the circumstances like using a Web browser, I'd definitely choose to have the useful thing w/o security.

[hajola]

It seems it would depend on the persons risk tolerance.

And assessing risk of freely available open source software is still difficult, you either rely on all the authors being standup citizens, or on the bulk of the reviewers to be truthful and knowledgeable.

[donio]

It's open-source, about 10K lines of good quality self-contained JS code with no obfuscation so it's not that hard to go through it yourself. It moves fairly slowly these days so once you have done this once it's easy to stay on top of the changes.

[bspammer]

I guess for me it’s a combination of:

* The extension has a genuine need for the permissions

* It’s an old extension at this point, with known maintainers with names and faces

* I really, really want the features