Under New Management

Detect when your extensions have changed owners

Intermittenty checks your installed extensions to see if the developer information listed on the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Addons store has changed. If anything is different, the extension icon will display a red badge, alerting you to the change.

Created by Matt Frisbie

Media:

• Hacker News discussion
• Featured in tl;dr sec Newsletter
• Featured in The Register
• Featured on Security Now ep 965

Why is this needed?

Extension developers are constantly getting offers to buy their extensions. In nearly every case, the people buying these extensions want to rip off the existing users.

The users of these extensions have no idea an installed extension has changed hands, and may now be compromised.

Under New Management gives users notice of the change of ownership, giving them a chance to make an informed decision about the software they're using.

Installation

Install for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/under-new-management/jppepdecgemgbgnjnnfjcmanlleioikj

Install for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/under-new-management-v2/

OR

Download a prebuilt release, unpack the .zip file, and load the dist directory into your browser.

Building from source

Under New Management uses Plasmo

pnpm install to install dependencies

pnpm dev to run locally

pnpm build --zip to build a release

pnpm build --target=firefox-mv3 to build for Firefox

Why does this need an external server?

Browsers have special rules about modifying extension marketplace domains. For example, you cannot set declarative_net_request rules for chromewebstore.google.com. Therefore, this extension delegates the developer info checking to the ExBoost API server.