If they do, isn't that precisely what Google would want? Isn't it only the rate and volume of requests that are a problem?
It's obvious the limiting is rate based, otherwise this would never have happened, so if it is rate based then the toolbar could pace itself to below that rate. Of course that would 'give away' the rate to observers of the toolbar during a browser restart but they could observe that just the same by checking when they get blocked, so that's no loss.
The toolbar knows I'm logged in, knows that a browser has just restarted and presumably can see how many instances/tabs are open (after all that's what it provides the info on) so it has all the data at it's disposal to make the right decision. This seems like a simple oversight to me (that a user installing the toolbar on a machine with a large number of tabs open would land in this situation).
Firefox extensions are Javascript CSS and XUL so I don't think that's obvious. I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that they might be sand boxed and have no awareness of each other. Is it one instance of the toolbar per "page-opened" event? Is it one instance per window? What I was describing was a way to stay under the limit without having centralized state-aware rate-limiting code. If that's possible, then yeah sure, do it that way.
It's obvious the limiting is rate based, otherwise this would never have happened, so if it is rate based then the toolbar could pace itself to below that rate.
It's not obvious to me. I think the issue is that the OP opens 50 tabs simultaneously after a crash and each window opens a connection to google without a rate limit of any kind. My idea was a way to do it without a centralized state.
Multiple Mozilla extension instances are indeed able to communicate via some centralised code.
Meh, I have trouble believing that spammers cannot experiment to find this number out themselves. The binary search on rate would require only a handful of IPs before you acquire it to a sufficient resolution for working purposes.
Of course, that solution is so simple, I'm sure there's a reason it's not possible.
I'm assuming the toolbars can't communicate between each other. On toolbar launch, it should pick a random number between 1 and x and wait that many ms before contacting google. Pick x by looking at the number of req/sec that trigger a ban and the high-end number of tabs a power user might restart with. This would spread the requests out over that time period and keep it under the ban.