Technical Analysis: Installing 99.94% of All Firefox Extensions
By
RohanAdwankar
1mo ago· 21 min readenInsight
100/100
Golden Brown
Bagelometer↗
Kettled twice. Extra chewy, extra trustworthy.
Score100TypeanalysisSentimentneutral
Summary
A technical exploration of installing nearly all Firefox extensions (99.94% of them) by scraping the Firefox add-ons store API. The article details the process of discovering there are approximately 84,000 Firefox extensions, the technical approach to scraping them via the public API without authentication or rate limits, and the challenges encountered including missing extensions and API limitations. It's a technical deep dive into the Firefox extension ecosystem and the practicalities of attempting to install them all.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledIt turns out there's only 84 thousand Firefox extensions.
Technically we only installed 99.94% of the extensions.
There's a public API for the add-ons store. No authentication required, and seemingly no rate limits.
The search endpoint can take an empty query. Let's read every page:
That sounds feasibly small. That even sounds like it's less than 50 gigabytes. Let's install them all!
Oh, you use Firefox? Name every extension.
