Chrome/Firefox: access source of an extension

Question

Hi folks,

Do Chrome or Firefox make your extension's source code open to the host machine? And if yes where are the respective folder on Mac?

Cheers
Parsa

Answer 1

For Firefox it's:

/Users/YOUR_LOGIN/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/PROFILE_ID/extensions/EXTENSION_ID/

Answer 2

Yes, assuming some or all of your extension is written in an interpreted and un-obfuscated language. Plain Javascript is common for extensions in both browsers.

For any firefox extension, if you save the .xpi file instead of installing it, it is just a zip file and you can open it with any archive tool (e.g. 7zip or WinZip).

The same goes for the .crx files Chrome. As an test, I just downloaded and opened the .crx for Google Mail Checker Plus using 7zip, and it looks like this is entirely written in javascript and all the source can be read.

In either case, how much usable source code you can get from this depends on the language(s) that are used in the extension.

Google Chrome installs the extension into a randomly generated directory in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions and registers it in its Preferences file (according to this).

As heb says, Firefox installs the extension to ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/PROFILE_ID/extensions/EXTENSION_ID/