How safe are these to use? (adblock, gmail, peerguardian, etc)

[rox1co]

i really love using firefox adblock, gmail extensions such as gmail drive, space, etc and I like the concept of peerguardian, but how safe is it to use these extensions made by people who aren't affiliated with firefox or gmail

i have "googled" these questions such as, how safe is blah blah, but i just wanted to ask your opinions in here. perhaps some of you have actually gone through "coding" of these programs and extensions.

just using these 3 as examples since they're applications that avg users would use

 

[SmoochyTX]

They're soooo unsafe. You should go back to Win 3.1 and access using DOS.

😉

 

[eplebnista]

Originally posted by: SmoochyTX
They're soooo unsafe. You should go back to Win 3.1 and access using DOS.

😉

rofl

 

[kamper]

It's a valid question. Any time you install software from a source you don't know you should be wondering what it will do.

OP, you've got two options mainly. First, most of them are open source so you can check them out for yourself. You may not find all security holes, but you'll at least be able to tell if it's doing anything nefarious. Second, you can rely on the community. If you hear a lot of people recommend an extension and you trust that these people aren't trying to dupe you, you can probably trust the extension. Or if it's linked from one of the mozilla pages that aggregates extensions, I think that means it's been validated by actual mozilla people. It's not foolproof, of course. Someone could put one over on the community if the source code isn't really carefully examined but at some point you've just got to relax and use the stuff. It's a good idea to know in the back of your mind what you'd do if firefox started attacking your system 😉😛