HN Explorer

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gathered
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?
xg15
There was also a nice dramatic arc to it, with the browser first (seemingly) behaving normally, then starting with a few scattered theme switches, then going increasingly off the rails as more and more extensions start up.

Also the metal pipe.

xnorswap
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.

ryanisnan
Dang this is so good. Well done.
username135
"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.

lapcat
> 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.

layer8
> 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. ;)

proactivesvcs
"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."
thegdsks
Good Luck Remembering all those icons.. Amazing
BoppreH
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.

throwatdem12311
Turns out even browser extensions can be comedy.
benlimanto
It's a fun comedy to watch man. haha... how we developer design and how usually user use, is different matter!
codemog
I love the small few who take the time to do crazy stuff like this. Very entertaining.
3abiton
> Dr. B is the king of slop, with 84 extensions published, all of them vibe coded. > How do I know? Most of their extensions has a README.md in them describing their process of getting these through addon review, and mention Grok 3. Also, not a single one of them have icons or screenshots. > Personally, I’m shocked this number is this low. I expected to see some developers with hundreds!

This is really surprising. Either because Firefox is not that popular ir mozilla has an automatic filter?

mmsc
The website of this blog and their connections listed are a sight to behold. I miss that version of the internet.
mid-kid
Seeing this article, and how much webextensions manage to mess up the browser, I'm wondering how bad this experiment would've been with the legacy XUL extensions. Maybe they had a point in getting rid of them...
fulNamSexBoomer
This obviously showcases that Firefox needs to work on their support for having all browser extensions at once. Users want and need this.
curioussquirrel
Absolutely unhinged and very entertaining. Thanks for sharing!
jason1cho
This article is interesting but hard to read in certain places because it contains distracting information.

Better to organize it into main findings and side stories.

xg15
The eternal tension between "this service mesh is completely overengineered for our usecase" and "our broker is far to slow for our 84.205 microservices"...
m132
Brings back the memories of using Internet Explorer when every other installer was fighting for toolbar space!

Every Internet café had at least 2, with Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and later on, Bing being the main contenders.