The problem with plugins is that they give full control over your browsing to whoever controls the plugin.

I sometimes install plugins myself if the code is open source and it is small enough for me to vet it.

I would love vimium, but the code is way too big to vet it myself.

I wish there was some party that is trustworthy, vets codebases like these and publish hashes of trusted versions.

An alternative would be more modular codebases. So instead of publishing a giant box of code with all kinds of vim-like behavior, publish lots of small ones. Like the code to make gg work.

I think you are being overly paranoid.

If you want to fight for security on that level, your computer life must be miserable. You are also missing out a lot of great tools and are way less effective then folks that use them (and thus less competitive).

I am all up for great security in OS, emails, browsers, messangers etc, but it has to stop somewhere. Also, this kind of stuff like vimium is so widely used that somebody would probably notice if something funky is going on (everything leaves some traces, you dont really need to look at the code to notice it most of the time).

Your proposed way to solve this issue is way worse - now, instead of having one monolitic but still simple and well rounded app you have thousands of little scripts that combined are also hessle to review, belong to way more humans with different agendas (instead of single or couple) and would be horror to initialize (really sounds like nodejs ecosystem).

Just get the damn thing and relax a bit. Anything malicious that could be done by some developer is already done by big evil corps anyway (and more) and you cant really escape those.

I share your perspective, but it's not a good perspective to encourage, imho.

I believe it is. You can say the same thing about anything else - do you inspect any TV or telephone you buy for hidden recording devices? Do you inspect any hotel/airbnb room ? Do you do that with supplements, cooking aparatures, plant checmials, mattress material, car breaks etc.. No you don't. You believe its good. Multiple times it did happen they were not good and stuff were spying, poisoning, leaking, killing etc. Yet nobody decides to not buy stuff in order to be 100% protected like there is such thing, because it is miserable life.

Life is risky by default. You calculate your ods.

Great argument. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and it's fallout probably have some good lessons to learn on both sides of this question.

Honestly I'd rather have one big unified collection if I was going to review.

Came here to say this. Vimium is excellent! I've been using it for the last number of years and when I switch to a new computer without it, I still fire off the `gg` and wonder why the browser isn't picking it up. It's essential to me at this point.