<story><title>Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/malware-vendors-buy-chrome-extensions-to-send-adware-filled-updates/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yaakov34</author><text>Can we start a petition for Google to let us disable extensions on specific sites? After reading the last few stories about this, I am quite sure I don&amp;#x27;t want any extensions whatsoever running in the same tab as my Gmail account. I think there is some extension that does this for you (turns off other extensions per site), but then we get into a &amp;quot;who guards the guardians&amp;quot; situation.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention we need better and finer grained permissions for extensions in general, now that we use so many web apps with crucial data.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikcub</author><text>I achieve this by having multiple users in Chrome. My main user is signed into my google account and has no extensions installed and all plugins disabled, I only access gmail and google services with it.&lt;p&gt;My second user account is logged into basic services like HN, reddit, amazon and has only adblock and disconnect installed.&lt;p&gt;A third user is not logged in anywhere and has adblock and a half-dozen other extensions installed including UA switcher. No plugins installed and cookies + cache cleared every day.&lt;p&gt;4th user has all the anonimity extensions installed and has privoxy + tor set as the proxy&lt;p&gt;I use Facebook in a completely different browser again, YouTube and video watching in yet another and development in chromium.&lt;p&gt;7 or 8 different cookie stores, and a throwaway temp email account associated with the 3rd and 4th user for signing up to services.&lt;p&gt;Start out by creating a separate user for browsing sites and eventually develop your own way to split up your web browsing profiles.&lt;p&gt;This can get a bit messy when you try and access from tablet or mobikle , but I&amp;#x27;d rather not have a single large profile and a huge exploit surface and sacrifice browsing history and remembering passwords.</text></comment>
<story><title>Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/malware-vendors-buy-chrome-extensions-to-send-adware-filled-updates/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yaakov34</author><text>Can we start a petition for Google to let us disable extensions on specific sites? After reading the last few stories about this, I am quite sure I don&amp;#x27;t want any extensions whatsoever running in the same tab as my Gmail account. I think there is some extension that does this for you (turns off other extensions per site), but then we get into a &amp;quot;who guards the guardians&amp;quot; situation.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention we need better and finer grained permissions for extensions in general, now that we use so many web apps with crucial data.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pasbesoin</author><text>Look into running separate sessions of your browser(s).  Both Firefox and Google Chrome (or Chromium) allow you to do this, although the interfaces for doing so differ.&lt;p&gt;A simple way to do this is to use different brands of browser, e.g. Gmail in Chrome and everything else in Firefox.  But... if you really prefer one browser over another, for &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; use, then the separate profiles thing works.&lt;p&gt;Note that in Chrome, this is now confused by the ability to change Google account log-ins.  That is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a separate, browser-level profile with separate configuration.&lt;p&gt;Instead, you are looking for the command line invocation argument --user-data-dir (in *NIX, at least; IIRC the flag name may differ slightly in the Windows version).&lt;p&gt;For Firefox, there is the -p flag.  IIRC, you have to combine it with another flag in order to ensure both that the profiles are running in separate invocations and that you can be prompted to choose what profile to use when you invoke Firefox.&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can create menu items &amp;#x2F; icons for these invocations to make them &amp;quot;clicky&amp;quot; and avoid having to go to the command line and enter them each time, if you prefer.&lt;p&gt;P.S.  Yes, this will help you less if you insist upon clicking directly on&amp;#x2F;through links that are are e.g. mailed to you or, if you have Facebook in its own &amp;quot;box&amp;quot;, posted on Facebook.&lt;p&gt;From that perspective, having per site browser extension variability might still be useful.  But then, you&amp;#x27;re still looking at also controlling referer passing, cookies and other local data, etc., etc.</text></comment>