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0 pointsehsankia5y ago0 comments

You do realize that the original Pushbullet issue arose from Google trying to be even more strict and reduce the amount of malware, right? And even with all that, as you mention, CWS is still full of malware.

What hope does any other store then have to create a malware free web store if even Google can't? And if they allow installation from anywhere, do you realize that whatever state we are in now, it would be orders of magnitude worse?

If there is some way to get malware into your computer, someone out there will make you do it. That's exactly why installing extensions is so locked down. I don't understand how people think that it will magically all be better if users were given full access to install whatever from wherever. Have you never in your life interacted with an average non-poweruser?

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zmmmmm5y ago

> What hope does any other store then have to create a malware free web store if even Google can't?

I think you're giving Google too much credit here. For years nearly every single extension, no matter how targeted the purpose, has told me "This extension will have access to all your data on all your web pages". It is such a no brainer to do a little better than that but they tolerated it for years.

In a few cases I looked into why developers requested that kind of permissions and the answer was that Chrome permissions weren't designed well enough to allow narrower permissions. So Google has no excuses here. They control the browser and the store.

ehsankiaOP5y ago

Just because they had a more lax approach in the past doesn't mean they aren't working hard to regain control now. And either way, none of that addresses the issue where expanding control would only make the malware issue worse, not better.