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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

What difference does it make?

Having features function by default matters a lot in regards to user adoption. A very large portion of users will never change their default settings, let alone discover and install an add on for something Chrome has by default.

Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/when-it-comes-to-pr...

extensions are one lump sum offer away from becoming malware

e: immaigne people down-voting facts https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/-particle-chr...

The same is true of Firefox itself, or indeed any piece of software.

holy false equivalence batman. it's definitely harder to buy/compromise firefox

Yes, that's true, but it would be correspondingly more difficult to find an alternative. If a plugin is compromised you're much more likely to be able to easily find an alternative. So it's a trade-off either way.

the cost of a compromised plugin is not just the inconvenience, but also all the passwords you might enter on forms if the plugin has full permissions granted

That's a stretch. We're talking about a translation plugin here. If FF doesn't have a mechanism to keep passwords safe from that, then that is the problem, not the lack of native translation.

if a plugin can read what's in a field, it can read the passwords therein, I'm not talking about the password file.

I am not wise in the ways of Firefox plugins, but if the ability of a plugin to read a password field is not a separate permission, then that is a much more serious problem than the lack of native translation. That's just a huge gaping security hole, full stop. If that is indeed how Firefox is designed, then the lack of native translation should be the least of your concerns.

> I am not wise in the ways of Firefox plugins

> That's just a huge gaping security hole

> If that is indeed how Firefox is designed

that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?

here look yourself https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess...

and guess what permission the language extension need?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-spe...

Go back to this ancestor comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323832

We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.

Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."

good thing then that I linked you to the very spell checker parent included to show you that it's flagged with that goddamn permission I'll put it here as well since you have missed it > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-spe...

you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.

but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?

> that goddamn permission

What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.

Its true of things beyond software too. The problem is the power of people to produce large enough lump sums.

There's slight difference in that in Firefox's case tech journals will be writing about it, everyone else will be talking about it and it will be on front page of HN. In the case of random extension going rogue it will likely get unnoticed for years and when it is finally noticed there's a small chance it will be picked by HN if planets align.

Maybe. Take a look at my exchange with u/LoSboccacc a parallel branch of this thread. If what he claims is correct (I don't know, but he seems pretty confident) then there is already a huge gaping security hole in FF that no one is talking about (AFAICT).

not only is factual, it comes with linked sources for all the claimed points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336440

Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.

Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.

One aspect is having to maintain double dictionaries. Back in the early Mac OS X days the system-wide dictionary was one of the little features that made me happy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com