What to do when other extensions cause problems?

[mlissner]

I'm getting a ton of parsing errors today and they seem to stem from somebody that has the MetaMask extension installed (it has something to do with Ethereum, I guess.)

The extension adds about 10,000 lines of JS to every page, and that creates problems for us:

1. Parsing takes 10s instead of being nearly instant.
2. The parser fails, leading CourtListener to fail.
3. The size of the uploaded file is 500kb instead of about 5kb.

I filed a ticket with them to see if there's anything they can do:

https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/issues/3382

But I'm not particularly hopeful. I've also seen nodes go by that have names like <rmdocument>, which makes me think that's maybe something from Real Media? Not sure, but it's another extension that's causing trouble.

It seems like we need a way of:

• disabling other extensions (probably impossible) or
• detecting them (probably doable, but may require their cooperation) or
• working around them (probably Sisyphean)

Perhaps they'll suggest something in the parallel issue post, but short of that, I guess the easiest thing to do is to create a blacklist of extensions that we don't work with, then throw a warning when those are installed (and, if possible, active).

[mlissner]

Another one came up today called Forecastfox (fix version) 4.19 false forecastfox@s3_fix_version. I guess it has something to do with weather. It'd be nice to do something better here, like detect the error and tell the user. If nothing else, we can keep a running list of problematic extensions...

[mlissner]

I'm keeping a list of these and I'm not sure that there's much else we can do. Closing with regrets.