I'm Incredibly Weird About Browser Extensions and Mods

Browser Extensions have been a thing for a really long time. They're little pieces of software you can install to change the functionality of your web browser. Often, reviews of new browsers are quite critical of their extension support. Chrome has maintained its dominance in the browsing industry thanks in large part to its vast library of extensions.

I don't use them. And I weirdly hate the idea of installing even one.

Wait. What?

I have a weird thing about software, whether I'm using something for productivity or playing a video game: I like to have the vanilla experience.

If the vanilla experience doesn't do it for me in some way, I'm weirdly loathe to install extensions or mods to fix it.

I don't know why this is.

Sometimes my behavior is gently supported by the application itself. Take the console versions of Fallout 4, for instance. Bethesda did a ton of work to build a community marketplace full of mods I can install...but if I do that, it disables all the achievements in the game.

I like achievements. So the result is...I've never tried out a single mod.

Sometimes it doesn't make this much sense.

Firefox Quantum is a great browser. But it has one little quirk that keeps me from using it 100 percent of the time. I do a lot of writing inside a browser, and I listen to music while I'm doing that. If I use a web-based service like Google Play Music, I like to be able to control the music with the media keys on my Macbook...and Firefox Quantum doesn't support the media keys.

Are there extensions that enable this? Yes! Have I installed any of them? No!

It seems stupid, right?

I think part of me is afraid of screwing something up and having to spend time reinstalling my browser or removing the extension. I'm fully aware that on modern computers this takes seconds, which isn't actually an amount of time I should be worried about.

I'm also incensed that this feature isn't just included in the browser by default. It works in Safari. It works in Chrome. It should work in Firefox as well. But it doesn't.

I can still use my Media Keys with a third-party playback client like Spotify, so I guess that's something. Or I could, you know, install a free tiny extension.

I could even write one myself, if I really wanted to. But that would take even more effort.

Computer software is such a tenuous pile of design and code and potential problems that I enjoy seeing something "the way it was meant to be seen," without worrying about introducing even more complexity into the system.

Yeah. Maybe that's the reason!

I know that's not the best justification for missing out on little bits of code that would better my everyday experience. But it's how my mind works.