Kill switch for all add-ons

Add-ons Add-on Support
#1

Sometimes, a web page will not work right…completing a check-out procedure, etc… It is an add-on, or more than one stopping it. The only way for me to know which add-on is causing this, I have to disable them one at a time and re-try the web page until the offending add-on is found.

This is time consuming and annoying, so I usually just disable all of them, complete my transaction on that web page then enable all of them again. Problem is, this has to be done one add-on at a time…click…click…click…on and on.

A “kill switch” to do this all at once, then re-enable all at once would be very helpful to me. Is there already a way to do this I am not aware of?

#2

The easiest way currently is probably to use private browsing and not have any of the extensions that might interfere be allowed in private browsing.

1 Like
#3

You couldn’t switch to private browsing in the middle of a transaction, though - to complete checkout, say, as in the OP’s question.

I can see the point of a killswitch - like I sometimes switch off the ad-blocker if I suspect it of interfering.

#4

I have 15 add-ons. It’s actually faster for me to switch browsers and re-enter a password than disable and enable all of those!

Only one or two of them actually tell me they are blocking a specific pop-up, for instance. I see all kinds of digits accumulating in the tool bar where the icons are, but cant tell which other add-ons specifically are blocking a specific function on a web site.

#5

Most addons won’t interfere with pages and the common source of problems are content blocking addons.

In my experience if page doesn’t work as expected, it’s in 90% cases my adblock addon and 10% my “I don’t care about cookies” addon.

Also, many popular adblockers like “uBlock Origin” have popup with a big power button icon that disables it on the current page which turns to “reload page” button after click so it’s easy to enable/disable and reload (since page has to be reloaded).

#6

Thanks,

I am not very educated on this, clearly. I never thought to manipulate them from the toolbar! I have so many of them, probably trying to stop that annoying pop-up web sites have that seem to detect when your cursor is making a move to leave the page, and throws up that “Wait! before you go!” junk. I dont know why, but that bothers me.

Anyone that has a way to stop those?..I’m all eyes!

#7

Still wish I had a button I could click to drop all add-ons at once, then restore.

I have to literally disable them one at a time until the offending add-on is found, or in most cases I just drop them all so I can use a certain web site. I literally have notes for specific web sites on which add-ons have to be disabled in order to use.

I’m not mad at the add-ons, just the inability to disable and enable them all with one click.

#8

I’ve been wondering if one could write an extension that disables all other extensions.

  1. List all extensions with management.getAll()
    Then disable them with management.setEnabled()
    But that doesn’t work, because “The function allows enabling/disabling of theme addons, but will return an error if used to enable or disable other types of web extension.”
    https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/management/#method-setEnabled doesn’t mention this limitation, so maybe a kill switch extension is possible in Chrome. As long as the user doesn’t have to confirm all extensions individually…
  2. This one is more complicated :slight_smile:
    List all extensions with management.getAll()
    Then ask all extensions to disable themselves, with runtime.sendMessage()
    But that doesn’t work because there is no management.disableSelf(), only management.uninstallSelf()
    And all extensions would have to listen for messages from the kill switch extension.
    And the user would have to re-enable the extensions manually.

This has me wondering why there’s management.uninstallSelf() but not management.disableSelf()
Are there no other situations it would be useful?