brutal. I just typed out a much longer response and lost it when my time wasting extension saw the url change (time for a text area cache extension?)

you might find this useful: https://github.com/classvsoftware/under-new-management

my port (and now fork): https://github.com/maxtheaxe/under-new-management-firefox

they currently (PRs are welcome!) only check listing info. mine doesn't route requests through an external (non addon store) server.

a couple PRs are overdue on mine due to linting making the diffs impossible. I'll get to it. (see the wxt-migration branch)

I just download the extension file, check it out, and install it locally. No worries about future updates until something breaks (doesn't tend to happen).

at least on firefox, you can also just disallow automatic updates

I want to see the source, and I don't want to worry about future browser changes messing with my settings..

fair enough. I'll add that one fantastic use I've found for LLMs is quickly checking the source of a given addon (though obviously this is no replacement for a real audit or finely-grained permissions).

I'd be doing this type of thing a lot more if browsers didn't make it difficult to load unpacked addons (in which case I could be modifying things I didn't like on the fly).