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Mozilla Security

Skipping Extension Installation Delay

Firefox has a delay when you install extensions as a security mechanism. This is done because it would otherwise be pretty easy for a website to trick someone into installing an extension before they even realize what they are doing (which is obviously a bad thing). See Bug 162020 for details and even an example.

I’ve seen a few sites publicize how to disable this security feature, though I’d point out this is really not a good idea. It’s 5 seconds people. Even if you have 20 extensions installed, your talking about 100 seconds, less than 2 minutes of your life. Seems like a reasonable compromise for the extra security.

3 replies on “Skipping Extension Installation Delay”

@Christopher Finke: Agreed. I’ve been thinking for a while a nice mod may be to create a pref to disable it only for the file:// protocol. Since that’s likely pretty secure. A balance of security and convenience for developers.

We should be disabling the countdown when installing add-ons off of AMO, or other “we know they’re safe” sources. I also think there’s probably better ways of getting the same result, even if it’s just discarding click events for the first 2s that the dialog is showing. People will click again, and not have to wonder what the distracting UI is about.

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