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Comment by radley | Hacker News Reader

> I want my browser to prevent random extensions...

Why are you installing random extensions?

Not GP, but sometimes I want my browser to do pretty random/niche things without that compromising all of my browsing data.

How can the browser tell the difference between a random thing you want and a random thing you don't want?

The permissions mechanism.

How can the permissions mechanism be fine grained enough to prevent bad random things, and coarse grained enough that you can understand it?

Have you seen AWS IAM?

Power users who care about this don't need a GUI - a text file config in any format will do. Especially in this era of LLM assistance.

Requesting site access by click or by URL really isn't rocket science.

Not nearly every user will get it right, so extensions will probably still have to be monitored for malware for the foreseeable future, but it gives many users at least a chance at privilege minimization.

this is not a solution. Running an untrusted software will always be a security drawback. Permissions/sandbox/etc can decrease risk, but not eliminate it

Significantly reducing the risk is enough for me in many cases. Chasing “zero risk” is often a fallacy.

Expressing intent is good enough for me for this purpose. I understand that there are additional implementation specific risks.

Create a new profile, do the niche thing there, separately from the rest of your browsing.

I'm not. The only extension I trust enough to install is uBlock Origin.

Well great! You are already protected from random extensions then.

Yeah, by opting out of them altogether. I'd very much enjoy having useful extensions that are not dangerous instead.

You can't trust a code that you didn't audit before. End of story.

What you are asking for is simply impossible, even without any permissions rogue extensions can still do a lot. It's what some developers spend their entire time working on.

If Google couldn't fix it with Android, which has granular permission per applications, why do you think it's going to be even remotely effective on the web browser ?

Do you audit all the code running on your PC? I certainly did not audit Chrome (and I also don't really trust it).

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