Installing every Firefox extension: a data-driven crawl, analysis, and security takeaways
Summary
The article chronicles a large-scale effort to scrape and analyze Firefox extensions via the public addons API, exploring page sorts, category filters, and parallel data gathering. It culminates in a dataset of thousands of extensions hosted on Hugging Face and provides security observations about phishing, PUAs, and SEO spam in the extension ecosystem, along with practical code examples for data collection and Firefox extension management.