Trying to Install Every Firefox Extension

Using the Firefox Add-ons API, the author scrapes together around 84,000 extensions, showing the process of combining sort, category, and date filters to work around the search API's page limit (600 pages).

Initially, the author gathers missing entries by switching between sort orders like recommended, created, rating, hotness, updated, and downloads, then tries using exclude_addons to fetch subsequent pages. Finally, by collecting in parallel by category, the author secures 84,235 unique extensions, reaching a number that nearly matches the figure shown on the public website.

From the collected data, several interesting statistics are extracted.

• The largest extension is dmitlichess at 196.3MB
• The smallest extension is theTabs-saver at 7,518 bytes
• The worst-rated extension, the extension with the most screenshots, and the extension requesting the most permissions are also tallied
• The developer with the most published extensions is Dr. B, who has published 84 extensions

The author also personally examines cases of phishing extensions, SEO spam, and excessive permission requests. A fake wallet extension using homoglyphs is revealed to actually contain code that, after installation, fetches a URL from an external NocoDB spreadsheet and opens a phishing page; the author writes that after reporting it to Mozilla, a significant number were removed.

Finally, the author notes a follow-up update: after improving the collection process—which initially took 7 minutes each time—through parallelization and splitting by date ranges, the search API's limits can be worked around more efficiently.