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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

I found it more trustworthy to code my own extensions via ChatGPT. These are the last 2 ones. I pretty much dont care if people use them, as the mostly fulfill my own usecases.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/comparative-chatgpt...

https://thisismy.franzai.com/

The cost of (small) software is fast approaching 0, and it can be faster now to code your own solution, instead of looking for one that nearly mostly fulfills your usecases.

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> I found it more trustworthy to code my own extensions

I used to have a ton of little single use extensions that I barely ever used but thought at the time of installation, ”that could be useful one day". Then I started noticing I was liking really random shit on Facebook. That immediately ceased when I uninstalled all but Bitwarden, Leechblock and uBlock Origin. I will never install another random 3rd party extension again

Which of your single use extensions was causing you to like things on Facebook?

Not the GP, but just last week Google automatically removed a single use extension (https://readermode.io) from my browser after flagging it as malware (as I recall the extension updated itself a day before the removal). The extension has also been taken down from the Chrome web store (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/reader-mode/llimhhc...) though Google hasn't provided any details about what it was doing that led to the removal.

I think the asymmetry in payoffs explains this, since a bad actor who baits and switches their extension could do massive damage to users. So google try to catch this behaviour and inevitably have some false positives (extensions labelled malware that actually aren't). The cost of a false positive is annoyance. The cost of real malware getting through could be your bank balance.

Automatic extension updates is a stupid practice. The attack surface for a legit extension is minimal, while being huge for a malware update. I'm against almost all automatic software updates in general, but browser extensions take the cake for having an obscene cost/benefit ratio. Chrome won't even let you turn it off. Personally I extract and load all my extensions in developer mode.

the alternative is leaving software eternally insecure as people will not update them. and of those that will, 99.99% (probably not an exaggeration) will not have the interest, time, or ability to review code changes before updating.

There are some core technologies that should be updated automatically as the cost/benefit is well in favor of updates (by default, but with an option to turn it off). But the fact that we're at the point of all software updating automatically with zero acknowledgement that there is even a cost associated with it is a huge problem. Ostensibly a security practice but now serves as a means for software distributors to extract the maximum value from their users. The pendulum is well overdue for a swing back towards the middle.

I heard (on HN) that often an extension changes owners just before turning bad. Curious if that was the case here.

Correct! That's why I use "Under new management" https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/under-new-managemen...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240927002632/https://chromeweb...

There are several complains in the reviews, though it all seems a bit bizarre in that the issue was with an opt-in so-called "eco-mode" that basically was throwing pop-ups with affiliate links.

Tons of them. Custom download page, to avoid seeing the old ugly Chrome'a download shelf at the bottom of the screen.

> Tons of them. Custom download page, to avoid seeing the old ugly Chrome'a download shelf at the bottom of the screen.

Just to make sure—you seem to be replying to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42493152, which currently says:

> Which of your single use extensions was causing you to like things on Facebook?

Are you saying tons of your single-use extensions caused this Facebook liking, and a custom download page was one of them? Or was this meant to be a response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42492881?

(Or maybe something's wrong with parent links today. For me, on the main page, they are now turning into anchored links that don't seem to go where intended, which wasn't happening yesterday.)

I can't answer that question I'm afraid. I disabled somewhere in the region of 5-10 extensions and it would have required more effort than I cared to exert to figure out which was the culprit. This means that I can't categorically state an extension was to blame, but there was a strong correlation between my removing them and the spurious likes stopping.

I remember this happening when an extension got sold and then stole my Instagram cookies. Absolutely tonnes of likes of weird shit.

Haha exactly! Except I didnt bother to publish mine on chromewebstore, it's just on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/natural_aliens/geminiwrap_plugin ...it makes Gemini-Chat voice dictation a bit more useful.

My other one, the remove-youtube-shorts, is almost an one-liner, so I didnt even publish it it's too trivial I think. Everyone just make your own!

Yeah, creating the marketing screenshots and filling out the publishing form takes longer nowadays then coding the actual extension.

Also if anyone wants to uses an extension I would much rather they make the minuscule effort to create a local folder, put the files in there, and load the extension's folder with the chrome extension mgr. Maybe even they can peek at the source code... I really don't see why I'd have to push my name, address, email etc on some google storefront and submit myself to spam reviews at the big "google-internet" party in the cloud.

I was updating my Chrome Web Store extensions to MV3 the other day. Had to fill a fair bit of new stuff. Then one dead simple extension I haven’t touched in a decade got its update rejected due to “description provided is insufficient to understand the functionality of the item”, even though anyone who bothered to seek it out absolutely would have no trouble understanding what it does (according to analytics on the dashboard, there are a grand total of ~20 active users and a couple hundred throughout its lifetime), never mind what those lay reviewers think. The review process is really dumb.

I'm gonna need the remove youtube shorts one

You can do it natively inside ublock origin if you don't want to install an extra extension (often the case for a surprising number of simple extensions, actually).

I used to block it myself with my own filter, but after YouTube changed things up and broke it I've just been using someone else's filterlist and it works the same.

https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

An extension doesn't make sense for a simple DOM manipulation - I'd recommend installing Tampermonkey then finding a script like the following:

https://github.com/hallzy/remove-youtube-shorts/blob/master/...

But did you "code" them with chatgpt also?

I'm too scared to download extensions, so I use bookmarklets (on Firefox).

But I like your suggestion of using ChatGPT to write extensions.

Tampermonkey scripts with chatgpt is even faster. Adding a functionality to a website just by pasting the site's html in chatgpt and in 2min I get what I need.

Making a simple tool for a site or two is the perfect use case for a userscript manager like TamperMonkey/ViolentMonkey (FOSS alternative), I think making your own extension is somewhat overkill

Easier to share with others, too

Interesting that extensions are not seen as trustworthy. I installed a third-party one for work, and it kept opening up the developers website which was blocked by our firewall. Why try to do a web action the user didn't request? It devolves trust.

Your cost but not the cost.

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