✨ Feature Suggestion | Better Browser Addons Section

[jonaharagon]

Description:

We recommend, in an experimental capacity at least, a Chromium based browser (Brave). We also recommend a lot of extensions that are available on any browser, not just Firefox. Therefore, we should rename the "Excellent Firefox Privacy Add-ons" section on the site to just "Privacy Browser Extensions" and include buttons that link directly to the download page for either Firefox or Chrome for each extension.

[five-c-d]

My understanding is that as of December 2018 the brave4desktop codebase has finished transitioning away from the Muon-fork-of-Electron and is now based on the upstream chromium project, just like the brave4android has been architected for some time now. Therefore I believe that chromium-compatible-extensions should "just work" but they do need to be chromium-compatible (which I'm pretty sure is not quite 100% identical to chrome-compatible).

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017909112-How-can-I-add-extensions-to-Brave- claims that 'most' chromium-compatible extensions in the ChromeStore will work on braveBrowser. There is a first-draft-whitelist of 3800 extensions -- brave/brave-browser#951 (comment) -- which passed a basic smoke-test. They do not have their own extensionStore yet, but this is probably planned 'eventually' to occur. brave/brave-browser#637 (comment)

See also this tracking-issue about chrome://extensions where the installed ones would get listed & configured == brave/brave-browser#1178 (comment) One pretty-severe limitation is that when in Tor-mode and/or private-mode, extensions 'suddenly' do not really work right anymore! brave/brave-browser#2761 (comment) There is ongoing effort to solve that but nothing trumpeted as a successful resolution, yet. One not-as-severe but painful limitation is that extensions, once installed, are auto-update with no way to switch to manual-approval-of-each-extension-update, nor to selectively disable auto-updates on a per-extension basis. brave/brave-browser#3811

ChromeApps also are currently causing a crashing-bug, but it seems to have a workaround of sorts since the crash is 'handled' somewhat-gracefully? brave/brave-browser#3766 (comment)

include buttons that link directly to the download page... for each extension

This is a good idea for extensions that are "friendly enough for the everyday endusers" but I would caution against having a one-click-installer for NoScript and also for uMatrix, maybe more... some of the extensions should only be installed if the enduser has actually thought it through, we don't just want folks saying "oh yeah give me everything I want privacy" and then finding out that all their cookies which they had saved logins into are deleted :-)

[blacklight447]

this should be more trivial as most browsers all use the web extentions model, which makes most plugins cross browser.

[jonaharagon]

This was resolved in #1149