Controlling when extensions update
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It seems that users have no control over when extensions update themselves. At least none that I can find. It seems they check for and install updates on every launch. There is a strangely-named "Developer Mode" which, as far as I can tell, only provides an option to immediately update all the extensions. The [b]problem[/b] is the converse: I do not want the browser to silently update extensions which are working 100% well, for some unknown-to-me new version which might be broken or buggy, at a time unknown to me, so that I discover the hard way that some critical function (like blocking trackers or malicious javascript) was broken through an update without my knowledge, putting me at risk. Is there a way for users to prevent extensions from updating until the user chooses to do so?
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Hi,
as far as I know, there's no simple way to achieve this. I find workaroud to manually disable it -> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27657617/how-to-disable-google-chrome-extension-autoupdate. But it's kind of pain in the a**,
Also I don't understand this so called modern "simplicity" approach, we know everything better than user and so on. Forcing updates is just total crazy and really stupid thing IMHO. This guys that force this don't know a thing about how to maintain system in productive status. Simply sad.
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I don't know a solution for this problem, but when I used chrome time ago, I had a extension installed, which notifies you, if any extension is updated (perhaps it was this extension)
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as far as I know, there's no simple way to achieve this. I find workaroud to manually disable it -> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27657617/how-to-disable-google-chrome-extension-autoupdate. But it's kind of pain in the a**,
Thanks for the link.
The 2nd option doesn't work as there is no "Vivaldi updater" plugin to disable.
The 1st option is yep, a PITA. So I guess we wait for Vivaldi to come up with a solution on this eventually.
Also I don't understand this so called modern "simplicity" approach, we know everything better than user and so on. Forcing updates is just total crazy and really stupid thing IMHO. This guys that force this don't know a thing about how to maintain system in productive status. Simply sad.
I agree.
Though these days, Microsoft with Windows 10 is 10x worse than this. They are really disgusting.
At least Vivaldi is mostly sticking to the original Opera philosophy of providing lots of choice to users in many other ways. I think most of these "simplistic stupidities" are just artifacts of the Chromium architecture Vivaldi is based-upon. They seem to be slowly-but-surely getting rid of the worst examples. I hope they get to this one eventually.
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[removed as not working]
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@AsterX said in Controlling when extensions update:
[removed as not working]
What finally seems to work for me, is replacing the 'update_url' values from their original ULR to 'http://localhost/', but not in the Preferences file, like some suggest (no effect, no matter if replaced, deleted url or deleted complete entry), but in the manifest.json-files of the single extensions (of course close Vivaldi first).
When the GNU tools 'find' and 'sed' are installed the following might help:
$ cd ~/.config/vivaldi-snapshot/Default/Extensions
$ find -name "manifest.json" -exec sed -r -i.bak 's%"update_url"\s*:\s*"[^"]+"%"update_url":"http://localhost/",%g' {} ;Another (unchecked) idea would be to remove the user rights to write into the folders …/Extensions/EXTENSION_IDs – the extensions should then still be able to write in their subdirectories, so they should be able to work normally, but as they should not be able to create a new directory in …/Extensions/EXTENSION_ID, no new version folder should be created and so no new version should be installed.
Both tasks will of course have to be done for each newly installed extension again.
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I understand the pressure to always keep the browser and extensions up-to-date.
But I’d very much like to have the option to review the functional changes.
I trust all my extensions in their current form (most are open-source, all are from reputable sources), but I’d like to verify the updates (I keep hearing of nefarious ones and accidentally-on-purpose abuses).
For technical people that could be as simple as a prompt to review and confirm the update.
For regular users that could be based on a reputation rating, or even a web-of-trust thing (my spouse and geek friends vouch for it).
In case the update is for an urgent, security, fix, I’d prefer the extension disabled immediately, and again the option to review it.
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