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Comment by henry_flower | Hacker News Reader

I generally try not to use any, because for some reason I can't force myself to trust an extension w/o looking into its code--the process that eats too much time.

So I have only 5 of them installed.

From chrome web store:

* blank ntp (shows a blank page, rather than the chrome default)

* ublock origin (duh)

Not from the web store (I "trust" them, for I wrote them):

* copy_anchor_text

* dereferrer

* hn-dweller

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I assume you also looked into the entire code base for Chromium (you are using Chromium, aren't you? Using Chrome - with its abundance of closed source gimmickery - would not make sense given your statement) before deciding it was worth your trust?

While I understand why you'd want to look at extension code before installing it I do not understand the trust in Chrome. Given the size of the code base it is more or less impossible for a single person to decide its trustworthiness by 'looking at the code', given that a single intentional 'mistake' can make the difference between trust and thrash.

yes, I use Chromium, but mainly because Fedora doesn't have Chrome in their pkg repos. yes, I've looked into the Chromium src & have run away screaming, mainly because I'm not a big C++ fan.

I'm fine w/ Google products. I don't trust a random extension from a random Vasya ThE HacKeR, especially w/ "read & change all your data" permissions.

You can do things in Chrome extensions that really are quite scary. Turning that around to not trusting Chrome seems like a bit of a straw man.

Is it possible to choose a different background for 'blank ntp' extension?

judging from its source, all it does is inject a blank .html file:

https://github.com/tvdv/BlankNTP/tree/master/BlankNTP

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