Working log behind Measuring Browser Extensions. Corpus-wide caveats — the venue scope, the selection funnel, the extraction's own error rates — are on corpus and are not repeated here. This page carries only what is specific to that one page: the population rule, every query with its denominator, the report script and its unedited output, the quote checks, the external sources verified and rejected, the reviewer log, and the things that could not be established.

Written as a working log, not as prose. Read it if you are checking a number.

Fixed before the first figure was computed, because “papers about browser extensions” is a phrase and not a population. It is the comment at the top of scripts/ext_fold.mjs and is reproduced here verbatim so the page can be audited without repository access:

IN SCOPE (object / object-partial): the paper produces a reported finding ABOUT browser extensions — their code, their store listings, their permissions, their observable effect on a page, the set a user has installed, or the people who write and use them.

OUT OF SCOPE: a paper that only SHIPS an extension as its instrument or as the deployment vehicle for its own defence (instrument); a paper that assumes a malicious extension in a threat model without measuring any real ones (attack-vector); a paper that draws samples of something else out of an extension store (corpus-source); a citation (mention); and a different sense of the word (homograph).

A paper is a candidate if any of four signals fires. Each candidate then carries a hand verdict; report_browser_extensions.mjs exits 1 if a candidate has no verdict or a verdict has no candidate, in both directions.

The object regex, counted rather than tested:

/\bbrowser[- ]extensions?\b|\bChrome extensions?\b|\bFirefox (add-?ons?|extensions?)\b
 |\bWebExtensions?\b|\bChrome Web Store\b|\baddons\.mozilla\.org\b|\bextension stores?\b
 |\.crx\b|\bcontent scripts?\b|web[- ]accessible resources?/gi

The threshold is not defended by roundness. Three measurements bound it:

• A bare /browser extensions?/i over the corpus fires on 535 papers. Almost all are one citation of Ghostery or uBlock Origin.
• The density distribution over the 626 papers with at least one match (report section A3):

The cut admits 197 papers on the D signal and leaves 429 out.

• The recall check. Re-running the candidate sweep with a much wider signal — full text matching any extension artefact string (Chrome Web Store, .crx, moz-extension, chrome-extension://, manifest.json, MV3, web accessible resources, addons.mozilla.org) — adds 32 papers outside the 218. All 32 were read on 2026-09-02. Every one is a reference-list URL, a one-sentence citation, or a different sense of the word. In-scope papers added: 0.

Two of the 32 are worth recording because they are the near-misses: Mistrust Plugins You Must (USENIX Security 2022) is about WordPress plugins and cites the malicious-extension literature in its first paragraph; The Curious Case of the PDF Converter that Likes Mozart (PoPETs 2016) samples from the Google Drive apps section of the Chrome Web Store, which is a store crawl of something that is not an extension. Both are homograph.

Every verdict was made by reading the paper's own first-person sentences about extensions, printed by a helper over paper.cols.txt (the query is in the report's --quotes path; the raw dossier is out/ext/firstperson.txt, not published because it is 98 KB of quotations). The distinction that did the most work is between a paper whose results include a statement about extensions and one where extensions appear only in the evaluation of the paper's own system.

The single-label choice is a limitation. object-partial is not a confidence level, it is a scope statement, and eleven papers sit close to the line. The page's headline (68) is reported with its split (47 + 21) everywhere so a reader who disagrees can take the 47.

The corpus-wide 43.0% baseline for population.listVersion is from data/extract/OVERVIEW.md (Where the field goes quiet), computed over the 5,712 papers that drew a study population — a different population from the 38 here, which is why it is labelled as a baseline and not compared arithmetically.

node scripts/report_browser_extensions.mjs. The full output is long; the sections the page reads from are reproduced verbatim below. Nothing here is retyped.

report_browser_extensions-output.txt

==============================================================================
A. THE POPULATION
==============================================================================
corpus                                 5859 papers, CCS, IEEE-SP, IMC, NDSS, PETS, USENIX, WWW, 2010-2026
candidate sweep (D>=5 | S | C | X)        218 papers
  hand verdicts                        218 (sweep and map agree in both directions)
 
Role            Papers  Share of 218  In scope
--------------  ------  ------------  --------
instrument      92      42.2%         no
object          47      21.6%         yes
mention         38      17.4%         no
object-partial  21      9.6%          yes
homograph       13      6.0%          no
attack-vector   5       2.3%          no
corpus-source   2       0.9%          no
 
IN SCOPE (object + object-partial)     68 papers  = 47 object + 21 object-partial
  as a share of the whole corpus         1.2% of 5859
OUT OF SCOPE                           150 papers
  of which role=instrument              92 - the extension is the paper's own tool or defence vehicle
 
-- why each candidate fired (a paper can fire on several) --
Signal                                                 Candidates
-----------------------------------------------------  ----------
D  full text matches the object regex >= 5 times       197
S  population[].sourceList names an extension channel  52
C  classification[].resourceName names extensions      13
X  a detection[] tuple names extensions                39
 
==============================================================================
A2. RECALL CHECK — widening the sweep to any extension artefact
==============================================================================
Papers outside the candidate set whose full text names Chrome Web Store,
.crx, moz-extension, chrome-extension://, manifest.json, MV3 or a
web-accessible resource: 32.
All 32 were read by hand on 2026-09-02; every one is a citation, a
reference-list URL or a different sense of the word.
In-scope papers added by the widening: 0 — true by construction, not a
measurement: the verdict map is keyed on candidates, so a non-candidate
cannot carry a verdict. The hand reading is what rules them out.
 
Bare-mention control: /browser extensions?/i alone fires on 535 papers.
 
==============================================================================
A3. THE DENSITY DISTRIBUTION THE THRESHOLD IS CUT FROM
==============================================================================
papers whose full text matches the object regex at least once: 626
Matches  Papers  Cumulative from the top
-------  ------  -----------------------
1-1      248     626
2-2      82      378
3-4      99      296
5-9      93      197
10-19    52      104
20-49    30      52
50-99    16      22
100-+    6       6
 
The threshold is 5. Everything at 5 or above is a candidate;
the 429 papers below it are not, and A2 is the check on that cut.
 
==============================================================================
B. SHAPE OF THE IN-SCOPE POPULATION
==============================================================================
Venue    In-scope papers  Share of 68  Corpus papers  Share of corpus
-------  ---------------  -----------  -------------  ---------------
USENIX   24               35.3%        1410           24.1%
IEEE-SP  12               17.6%        767            13.1%
WWW      12               17.6%        843            14.4%
CCS      8                11.8%        990            16.9%
NDSS     6                8.8%         701            12.0%
PETS     5                7.4%         510            8.7%
IMC      1                1.5%         638            10.9%
 
The base-rate column is the point: a venue share is only interesting
against the venue's share of the corpus as a whole.
 
Years       In-scope  Corpus  Share of corpus
----------  --------  ------  ---------------
2010–2013   9         511     1.8%
2014–2017   14        769     1.8%
2018–2021   19        1439    1.3%
2022–2024   15        1955    0.8%
2025–2026*  11        1185    0.9%
 
(* 2025-2026 is provisional: CCS and IMC 2026 have not been held and
 IEEE S&P / TheWebConf 2026 are incompletely selected. See literature:corpus.)
 
-- per year, in-scope only --
Year  In-scope papers
----  ---------------
2010  3
2011  1
2012  3
2013  2
2014  2
2015  5
2016  1
2017  6
2018  4
2019  6
2020  5
2021  4
2022  4
2023  5
2024  6
2025  9
2026  2
 
==============================================================================
C. WHICH QUESTION EACH IN-SCOPE PAPER ASKS
==============================================================================
Question            Papers  Share of 68  What it asks
------------------  ------  -----------  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
security            18      26.5%        Is the extension itself vulnerable, and what does that give an attacker?
fingerprintability  11      16.2%        Can a page tell which extensions you have installed?
blocking-efficacy   11      16.2%        Does the protective extension actually protect?
privacy-leak        8       11.8%        What does the extension send, and to whom?
malice              8       11.8%        Is the extension deliberately abusive, and can a store catch it?
people              7       10.3%        What do the users and the developers of extensions know and do?
permissions         4       5.9%         Does the extension ask for more than it needs?
crawl-effect        1       1.5%         What does an installed extension do to your own measurement?
 
-- question by period (papers) --
Question            2010–2013  2014–2017  2018–2021  2022–2024  2025–2026*
------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  ---------  ----------
fingerprintability  0          2          5          2          2
security            5          4          4          3          2
privacy-leak        0          1          1          4          2
malice              0          5          2          1          0
blocking-efficacy   1          0          5          2          3
people              0          1          1          3          2
permissions         3          0          1          0          0
crawl-effect        0          1          0          0          0
 
==============================================================================
D. HOW BIG IS THE STORE? — every extension-corpus size in the in-scope papers
==============================================================================
Population tuples with unit == "browser-extensions" and a stated n: 74
  across 38 of the 68 in-scope papers
  of which the source is a Chrome store: 50 tuples
 
-- Every Chrome-store extension corpus in the in-scope papers with n >= 5000 --
   (the rule is the size alone; the paper's own sampling word is a column,
    not a filter, so nothing is silently excluded)
Year  Venue    Extensions  Sampling as the paper states it  Snapshot stated
----  -------  ----------  -------------------------------  ---------------------------------------------
2012  WWW      5,943       exhaustive                       not-stated
2014  USENIX   47,940      not-stated                       not-stated
2015  IEEE-SP  1,000,000   exhaustive                       2011-03 to 2014-10
2015  WWW      18,030      exhaustive                       March 2014
2017  WWW      12,132      exhaustive                       July 2016
2017  USENIX   10,620      top-n                            not-stated
2017  WWW      10,000      top-n                            not-stated
2017  IEEE-SP  10,000      top-n                            not-stated
2018  CCS      178,893     exhaustive                       crawled between September 2016 and March 2018
2019  IEEE-SP  66,401      exhaustive                       not-stated
2019  NDSS     62,994      exhaustive                       2018-02
2019  USENIX   59,255      exhaustive                       November 2017
2019  WWW      58,034      exhaustive                       October 2017
2020  CCS      152,341     exhaustive                       January 2014–April 2020
2020  NDSS     102,482     exhaustive                       not-stated
2021  USENIX   501,349     exhaustive                       mid 2014 to mid 2019
2021  USENIX   116,485     exhaustive                       April 2019
2022  CCS      186,434     exhaustive                       June 2020
2022  CCS      180,361     exhaustive                       January 2022
2022  CCS      174,355     exhaustive                       February 2021
2022  USENIX   9,446       not-stated                       May–June 2021
2023  IEEE-SP  134,196     exhaustive                       2022-02-21
2023  IEEE-SP  47,207      purposive                        2022-02-21
2024  WWW      160,000     not-stated                       not-stated
2024  CCS      156,997     exhaustive                       available as of January 3rd, 2024
2024  USENIX   113,099     exhaustive                       August 2023
2024  USENIX   39,592      pre-existing-dataset             2023
 
   of those 27 rows, by sampling word: exhaustive=19, not-stated=3, top-n=3, purposive=1, pre-existing-dataset=1
 
-- every extension-corpus tuple (any store, any size) --
Year  Venue    n          Source                                      Sampling              Snapshot
----  -------  ---------  ------------------------------------------  --------------------  ----------------------------------
2010  USENIX   1,827      Mozilla add-ons web site                    random                October 2008
2010  USENIX   699        Mozilla add-ons web site                    top-n                 November 2009
2010  USENIX   100        official Chrome extensions gallery          top-n                 not-stated
2010  USENIX   40         addons.mozilla.org                          top-n                 not-stated
2011  IEEE-SP  1,139      popular Chrome extensions                   purposive             not-stated
2012  WWW      5,943      Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            not-stated
2012  USENIX   50         official Chrome extension directory         top-n                 June 2011
2012  USENIX   50         official Chrome extension directory         random                June 2011
2012  USENIX   50         top 50 Google Chrome extensions             top-n                 not-stated
2012  USENIX   42         top 50 Google Chrome extensions requiring   top-n                 not-stated
2012  USENIX   20         top 20 Google Chrome extensions             top-n                 not-stated
2013  CCS      30         Top 30 Chrome extensions                    top-n                 not-stated
2014  USENIX   47,940     Chrome Web Store                            not-stated            not-stated
2014  USENIX   392        Anubis                                      pre-existing-dataset  not-stated
2015  IEEE-SP  1,000,000  crawling the web; Safe Browsing; Chrome We  exhaustive            2011-03 to 2014-10
2015  WWW      18,030     Google Chrome Web Store                     exhaustive            March 2014
2015  WWW      78         Extension Defender                          pre-existing-dataset  March 2014
2015  WWW      17         Firefox extension store                     purposive             not-stated
2015  WWW      11         Google Chrome extension store               purposive             not-stated
2017  WWW      12,132     Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            July 2016
2017  USENIX   10,620     Chrome Web Store                            top-n                 not-stated
2017  USENIX   10,620     Firefox Add-ons                             top-n                 not-stated
2017  WWW      10,000     Google Chrome Web Store                     top-n                 not-stated
2017  IEEE-SP  10,000     Google Chrome Store                         top-n                 not-stated
2017  IEEE-SP  2,000      Google Chrome Store                         purposive             not-stated
2017  IEEE-SP  1,000      Google Chrome Store                         random                not-stated
2017  IEEE-SP  1,000      Mozilla Firefox extension market            top-n                 not-stated
2017  USENIX   721        Safari Extension Gallery                    exhaustive            not-stated
2018  CCS      178,893    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            crawled between September 2016 and
2018  CCS      2,790      Opera browser extensions                    exhaustive            at the time of analysis
2018  USENIX   46         extension store                             purposive             not-stated
2019  IEEE-SP  66,401     Chrome Extensions                           exhaustive            not-stated
2019  NDSS     62,994     Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            2018-02
2019  USENIX   59,255     Chrome Store                                exhaustive            November 2017
2019  WWW      58,034     Google Chrome store                         exhaustive            October 2017
2019  IEEE-SP  9,391      Firefox Add-ons                             exhaustive            not-stated
2019  NDSS     8,646      Mozilla add-on store                        exhaustive            2018-02-23
2019  IEEE-SP  2,523      Opera Add-ons                               exhaustive            not-stated
2019  WWW      1,000      custom seed list                            purposive             not-stated
2020  CCS      152,341    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            January 2014–April 2020
2020  NDSS     102,482    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            not-stated
2020  CCS      102        Chrome Web Store                            convenience           January 2014–April 2020
2021  USENIX   501,349    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            mid 2014 to mid 2019
2021  USENIX   116,485    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            April 2019
2021  IEEE-SP  30         Chrome Web Store                            purposive             2020-07-16
2021  IEEE-SP  15         Chrome Web Store and default browsers       purposive             2020-11-13 to 2020-11-18
2022  CCS      186,434    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            June 2020
2022  CCS      180,361    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            January 2022
2022  CCS      174,355    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            February 2021
2022  USENIX   27,342     Carnus dataset by Karami et al.             pre-existing-dataset  not-stated
2022  CCS      23,363     Firefox extension store                     exhaustive            April 2021
2022  USENIX   9,446      Chrome Web Store                            not-stated            May–June 2021
2022  USENIX   3,311      Dataset of detected extensions from Laperd  pre-existing-dataset  not-stated
2023  IEEE-SP  134,196    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            2022-02-21
2023  IEEE-SP  47,207     Chrome Web Store                            purposive             2022-02-21
2023  USENIX   100        Google Chrome Web Store                     top-n                 January 2023
2023  USENIX   20         Chrome Web Store                            top-n                 as of April 9, 2022
2023  USENIX   20         Firefox Add-ons                             top-n                 as of April 9, 2022
2024  WWW      160,000    Chrome Web Store                            not-stated            not-stated
2024  CCS      156,997    Chrome Web Store                            exhaustive            available as of January 3rd, 2024
2024  USENIX   113,099    Chrome Web Store sitemap                    exhaustive            August 2023
2024  CCS      104,484    Carnus                                      pre-existing-dataset  not-stated
2024  USENIX   39,592     Chrome Web Store                            pre-existing-dataset  2023
2024  CCS      26,591     Mozilla Add-ons Store                       exhaustive            available as of January 3rd, 2024
2024  USENIX   1,000      custom evaluation dataset                   purposive             not-stated
2024  USENIX   200        chrome-mal-ids repository                   top-n                 2023
2024  WWW      170        Google Chrome extension samples             pre-existing-dataset  not-stated
2025  WWW      15         Chrome Web Store                            purposive             not-stated
2025  NDSS     10         custom Chrome extension set                 purposive             not-stated
2025  USENIX   9          Chrome Web Store                            top-n                 not-stated
2025  WWW      3          Firefox Add-ons Store                       purposive             not-stated
2026  PETS     100        Torres et al. wallet dataset                pre-existing-dataset  2023 exact versions
2026  PETS     100        Chrome Web Store                            purposive             November 2025
2026  PETS     85         Chrome Web Store                            purposive             November 2025
 
Snapshot date / list version stated:   38 of 74 extension-corpus tuples (51.4%)
  of those, carrying an actual year:    37 of 74 (50.0%)
  stated but with NO year in the value: 1
     2018 CCS n=2790 :: "at the time of analysis"
  counted by paper:                    21 of 38 papers (55.3%)
  corpus-wide BASELINE, a DIFFERENT population: population.listVersion stated by
  2455 of the 5712 papers that drew any study population = 43.0%
  This reproduces OVERVIEW.md's row for the same field exactly. It is NOT
  comparable to the 55.3% above: different population, different unit.
 
==============================================================================
E. WHAT THE IN-SCOPE PAPERS USED
==============================================================================
Tool                Category                In-scope papers  Share of 68
------------------  ----------------------  ---------------  -----------
Selenium            browser-automation      13               19.1%
Chrome              browser                 12               17.6%
Chromium            browser                 10               14.7%
Google Chrome       browser                 9                13.2%
Firefox             browser                 8                11.8%
Python              other                   6                8.8%
Docker              infrastructure          6                8.8%
VirusTotal          classification-service  5                7.4%
Mozilla Firefox     browser                 5                7.4%
Puppeteer           browser-automation      5                7.4%
Esprima             program-analysis        4                5.9%
mitmproxy           proxy-interception      4                5.9%
EasyList            blocklist               4                5.9%
Ghostery            other                   3                4.4%
Selenium WebDriver  browser-automation      3                4.4%
EasyPrivacy         blocklist               3                4.4%
XHOUND              program-analysis        3                4.4%
Xvfb                infrastructure          3                4.4%
Brave               browser                 3                4.4%
ChatGPT             llm                     3                4.4%
 
-- classification[].method over the in-scope papers that classify --
denominator: 61 of 68 in-scope papers carry a classification tuple
Method               Papers  Share of 61
-------------------  ------  -----------
manual-labelling     32      52.5%
heuristic-rules      29      47.5%
static-analysis      13      21.3%
third-party-service  11      18.0%
curated-database     9       14.8%
dynamic-analysis     9       14.8%
blocklist            6       9.8%
regex-or-signature   4       6.6%
supervised-ml        3       4.9%
other                2       3.3%
unsupervised-ml      2       3.3%
llm                  1       1.6%
graph-analysis       1       1.6%
 
==============================================================================
F. FULL-TEXT PROBES — upper bounds, over the 5,859-paper corpus
==============================================================================
Probe                          Papers in corpus  Of which in scope
-----------------------------  ----------------  -----------------
Manifest V3 named              19                11
Manifest V2 named              10                9
declarativeNetRequest          11                6
web-accessible resources       27                19
chrome-extension:// URL        13                12
moz-extension:// URL           4                 4
use_dynamic_url                2                 2
CRXcavator                     4                 1
chrome-stats / crx4chrome      0                 0
Chrome Web Store sitemap       5                 5
an extension-store API         1                 1
extension enumeration/probing  5                 5
LLM used on extensions         552               6
 
Every figure here is an upper bound: a match is a mention, not a use.
 
==============================================================================
G. THE 2025-2026 SLICE — is anything superseded?
==============================================================================
in-scope papers 2025-2026 (provisional venue-years): 11
  2025 CCS      [blocking-efficacy] Local Frames: Exploiting Inherited Origins to Bypass Content Blockers.
  2025 IEEE-SP  [security] Security Analysis of Master-Password-Protected Password Management Protocols.
  2025 NDSS     [fingerprintability] Cascading Spy Sheets: Exploiting the Complexity of Modern CSS for Email and Browser Fi
  2025 USENIX   [fingerprintability] Double-Edged Shield: On the Fingerprintability of Customized Ad Blockers
  2025 USENIX   [privacy-leak] Big Help or Big Brother? Auditing Tracking, Profiling, and Personalization in Generati
  2025 USENIX   [people] "I have no idea how to make it safer": Studying Security and Privacy Mindsets of Brows
  2025 WWW      [blocking-efficacy] Breaking the Shield: Analyzing and Attacking Canvas Fingerprinting Defenses in the Wil
  2025 WWW      [people] Broken Access: On the Challenges of Screen Reader Assisted Two-Factor and Passwordless
  2025 USENIX   [security] Phishing Attacks against Password Manager Browser Extensions
  2026 PETS     [privacy-leak] The Masks We (Think We) Wear: Privacy Threats of Browser-Extension Wallets in the Web3
  2026 PETS     [blocking-efficacy] Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Update on Ad Block
 
in-scope papers whose schema records an LLM tool or an LLM classification method: 4
  2024 WWW Experimental Security Analysis of Sensitive Data Access by Browser Extensions.
  2025 USENIX "I have no idea how to make it safer": Studying Security and Privacy Mindsets of
  2026 PETS The Masks We (Think We) Wear: Privacy Threats of Browser-Extension Wallets in th
  2026 PETS Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Update on Ad
 
==============================================================================
H. MEASURED RESULTS QUOTED ON THE PAGE (detection[].prevalence)
==============================================================================
 
2017 USENIX Extension Breakdown: Security Analysis of Browsers Extension Resources
   installed-extension enumeration
      100% of 10,620 Chrome and 10,620 Firefox extensions detected.
      technique: Probed extension identifiers using timing or Firefox exception behavior.
 
2017 IEEE-SP XHOUND: Quantifying the Fingerprintability of Browser Extensions.
   browser-extension fingerprintability
      At least 9.2% on arbitrary domains and more than 16.6% on popular URLs among the top 10,000 Chrome extensions
      technique: Static patching, honey pages, DOM instrumentation, and DOM comparison
 
2019 NDSS latex-gloves-protecting-browser-extensions-from-probing-and-revelation
   WAR probing by web pages
      2,572 out of 10,000 domains probed for 45 different extensions
      technique: Monitored chrome-extension requests across popular pages
 
2020 NDSS Carnus: Exploring the Privacy Threats of Browser Extension Fingerprint
   web-accessible-resource extension fingerprinting
      25,866 extensions detected
      technique: Parsed manifests and probed each WAR URL using response status codes
 
2018 CCS Mystique: Uncovering Information Leakage from Browser Extensions.
   Privacy-sensitive information leakage
      3,868 of 181,683 extensions (2.13%)
      technique: Hybrid dynamic taint tracking with static data-flow and control-flow analysis
 
2024 USENIX Arcanum: Detecting and Evaluating the Privacy Risks of Browser Extensi
   Sensitive-data taint flows
      3,028 extensions (2.68%) across 113,099 analyzed extensions
      technique: Dynamic taint tracking from sources to exfiltration or storage sinks.
 
2020 CCS You've Changed: Detecting Malicious Browser Extensions through their U
   malicious browser extensions
      143 malicious extensions in 21 clusters
      technique: Rating anomalies, malicious keywords, and manual code-delta inspection
 
2019 IEEE-SP EmPoWeb: Empowering Web Applications with Browser Extensions.
   exploitable extensions
      197 extensions
      technique: Manual code review and exploit testing
 
2023 IEEE-SP Detection of Inconsistencies in Privacy Practices of Browser Extension
   Flow-to-Dashboard inconsistencies
      1,290 inconsistent flows across 820 extensions
      technique: Compared extracted data flows with positive and negative Dashboard statements.
 
2026 PETS Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Up
   ad blocking
      MV3 and MV2 means were 1.42 and 1.46 blocked ads.
      technique: Subtracted ad-blocker display-ad counts from no-blocker baseline.
 
==============================================================================
H2. THE PEOPLE HALF — the guard for "all but one are from 2021 onwards"
==============================================================================
  2017 CCS      Let's Go in for a Closer Look: Observing Passwords in Their Natural Habitat.
  2021 IEEE-SP  They Would do Better if They Worked Together: The Case of Interaction Problems Betwe
  2022 PETS     How Can and Would People Protect From Online Tracking?
  2023 USENIX   Defining "Broken": User Experiences and Remediation Tactics When Ad-Blocking or Trac
  2024 PETS     Block Cookies, Not Websites: Analysing Mental Models and Usability of the Privacy-Pr
  2025 USENIX   "I have no idea how to make it safer": Studying Security and Privacy Mindsets of Bro
  2025 WWW      Broken Access: On the Challenges of Screen Reader Assisted Two-Factor and Passwordle
 
  people papers: 7; from 2021 onwards: 6; before 2021: 1
 
==============================================================================
Z. EVERY NON-CORPUS NUMBER ON THE PAGE
==============================================================================
These come from primary sources outside the extraction and are re-checked by
scripts/external_checks_browser_extensions.sh, not by this report. They are
listed here so scripts/check_page_numbers.mjs can run whole-page.
 
  Chrome Web Store / Firefox AMO live listing counts   external_checks (chromewebstore.google.com, addons.mozilla.org)
  Chrome Manifest V2 end-of-life dates                 developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/mv2-deprecation-timeline
  Chrome declarativeNetRequest rule limits             developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/declarativeNetRequest
  Firefox moz-extension:// UUID randomisation          bugzilla / MDN
  use_dynamic_url manifest key                         developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/manifest/web-accessible-resources
  Extension IDs / update-manifest endpoints            clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx
  CRXcavator status                                    github.com/duo-labs/crxcavator
  Repository states, tags and last-push dates          GitHub API

No name fold was written, and that is a decision. Everything the page counts is an enum (classification[].method), an integer (population[].n), a date (population[].listVersion), a hand verdict, or a published regex. The one place a fold would have been needed — free-text tool names in §E — is reported as a ranking with a case-and-punctuation skeleton merge only, exactly as OVERVIEW.md says such fields may be reported, and the page does not quote any figure from it.

The residue that a fold would normally print is instead the homograph role: 13 papers where the word means something else. In full: IPv6 extension headers, ARM's Memory Tagging Extension, WordPress plugins, WeChat and app-in-app mini-programs, Deno third-party modules, Google Drive apps in the Chrome Web Store, RapidAPI listings, “manifest file extension”, “malicious file extensions”, “file extensions” used to identify ML model formats, “extension of the Android Middleware”, and two mobile-app-store papers. Each is listed with its reason inline in ROLE in scripts/ext_fold.mjs.

node scripts/verify_extension_figures.mjs --show. 66 of 66 needles located as of 2026-09-22¹⁾. Every needle is a phrase from the paper, checked against two renderings — paper.cols.txt with whitespace collapsed, and an independent pypdf extraction of paper.pdf — because the two fail on different sentences. On this run all 66 were found in .cols and none needed the PDF route, which is worth recording: the fallback exists and was not exercised, so it is not evidence that it works here.

Needles were deliberately rewritten from bare numbers into verbatim phrases after the first run: the first version had 53 of 58 needles under 20 characters, which is the length at which a match can happen by accident and “0 not located” starts passing for the wrong reason. How much of the page the 66 actually cover is now measured, not asserted. The script prints it: 40 of the 66 guard a figure the page prints, 9 guard a figure it does not, and 17 carry no number distinctive enough to test either way — and it lists all 26 of the latter two groups so they can be read. Until 2026-09-22 this section said every needle is a phrase the page prints, which was an assertion and was false: a needle is the paper's sentence, and the page usually states the figure in its own words. A needle in the 9 still does real work — it proves the figure exists in the paper — it just is not evidence about this page. Quote the 40, not the 66, when you mean page coverage.

After the rewrite three needles are short: “= 1.46 ” and “= 1.42 ” from a figure caption in the PoPETs 2026 MV3 paper, and “2,523” — the Opera corpus of [1Somé, Dolière Francis (2019): "EmPoWeb: Empowering Web Applications with Browser Extensions", in: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. (DOI)], added when the self-audit corrected the nothing measures Opera claim. All three were read in context by hand. The script prints the count, so the figure in this sentence is checkable against it.

Three needles failed on the first run and were not fabrications; all three were the page paraphrasing where the paper had different wording, and all three were corrected on the page rather than in the checker:

One needle is present in paper.cols.txt only after undoing a column splice: the CCS 2024 sentence about the store's rounded install counts reads “the Store pro|dataset2 . 3,398 extensions … |vides only inaccurate numbers for popular extensions” in the decolumned text, so the needle is the second half of the phrase.

The per-paper figures above are checked against the papers. Separately, the evidence.quote the extraction attached to each population tuple is checked against the rendering the extractor read, because the store-size table is built entirely from those tuples. node scripts/ext_quotecheck.mjs:

Re-run 2026-09-21 with the PDF fallback. The old figure was 5 below threshold; 4 of the 5 reach threshold against an independent pypdf rendering of the same paper.pdf and are reported as rescued. exact (54) and partial (15) did not move. See Quote-check refresh, 2026-09-21 at the foot of this page.

The one still below threshold in both renderings is the IBEX 2011 n = 1,139 tuple, at 56% coverage — the first row of the table below, and a column splice. By elimination the other four are the remaining rows: Ad Injection at Scale 2015, Experimental Security Analysis 2024 and both Privilege Separation in HTML5 2012 tuples.

Two of the four rescued are the two the table calls paraphrases, and that is a caution about what rescued means. It means ≥60% of the quote's five-word windows are present in the second rendering — not that the extraction is verbatim. A paraphrase that keeps most of the paper's wording can clear the threshold in a cleaner rendering. The hand verdicts below are the stronger evidence and they are unchanged.

Below threshold is not “unsupported”. All five were read by hand against paper.cols.txt and all five are present; three are column splices in the de-columned text and two are model paraphrases of a nearby sentence:

None of these five figures is used on the page as a headline. The 1,000,000 row is on the page, and it is on the page precisely as a caution that it is not a store size.

detection[].prevalence is a model summary of a result, not a quotation (see corpus). Every per-paper figure on the page was therefore checked against the paper's own full text, not against the attached evidence.quote. Two figures were dropped in drafting because the prevalence string and the paper disagreed on the denominator:

• Hulk's population tuple records 47,940 Chrome Web Store extensions; its own text says “Our analysis of 48,332 Chrome extensions”. The difference is a second corpus of 392 samples from Anubis. The page uses 48,332, the paper's number.
• The 2015 malvertising paper's tuple says 18,030; its abstract says “over 18,000”. The page uses 18,030, which is in the paper's methodology section, and says “of 18,030” rather than “over 18,000”.

Everything below was fetched on 2026-09-02 and is re-checkable with bash scripts/external_checks_browser_extensions.sh. That script prints FAILED explicitly per check, so a blocked or rate-limited call cannot read as a pass.

• No authoritative count of Chrome Web Store extensions exists. Google publishes none. The page reports the sitemap's 356,984 items with the unit stated, and converts it with the 200-item CRX sample (146 extensions of 198 served, 73.7%) to “on the order of 260,000 extensions”, saying in the same sentence that a 200-item sample can only bound that loosely. The earlier 40-item sample is superseded for the composition question and supports nothing narrower than roughly three-quarters extensions. Until 2026-09-22 this bullet said the page declined to convert at all, and cited the 40-item sample for it — a description of a decision the page had already stopped making.
• Nothing. The Manifest V2 question that looked like a discrepancy was resolved by measurement rather than left open: 17 of the 198 CRXs served are manifest_version: 2, which two days after the MV2 removal looks like the sitemap lagging the store. Reading the manifests shows it is not — 0 of the 17 are extensions; 9 are themes and 8 are legacy Chrome apps, neither of which the MV2 phase-out touches. The page states this, because a researcher filtering a corpus on manifest_version will otherwise conclude that MV2 extensions survived.
• Apple's current position on Manifest V2 in Safari. developer.apple.com serves client-rendered pages with no fetchable text, and the only Apple primary source found is a 2022 WWDC transcript. The page therefore says only that the standalone Safari extension gallery no longer exists, which is checkable, and makes no claim about Safari's manifest support.
• Whether the two CRX 204s in the sample are refusals or throttling. The endpoint's 204 is documented nowhere and is the same response as for an implausible prodversion. The published script raises on it rather than counting it as “no such extension”; the sweep counts it as its own outcome.
• chrome-stats.com content. HTTP 403 to every automated fetch. It is named on the page as the source behind most third-party counts, which is checkable from Wikipedia's citation, and nothing is quoted from it.

Five numbers on the page are not in any paper and not in any vendor document. Each is a single-day snapshot and the page says so.

The sampling design in the two sitemap samples is every-k-th over a sorted list of IDs, not random, so a re-run on the same sitemap reproduces the same items exactly. The AMO sample is not of that shape: it is the top 400 by installs, a biased frame, labelled as one in its row above. That is deliberate: a random sample would be unreproducible, and the store changes daily anyway.

pages/ext_corpus.py is embedded on the page as a downloadable <file> block and carries the whole file, not an abridgement; scripts/build_ext_codeblock.py --check fails if the embedded block stops being byte-identical to the committed one. An earlier draft published only the docstring, which is the failure that guard exists to prevent.

It was mutation-tested, not read:

That is the point of the three-case self-test. A one-case test of the form “the extension I know exists is found” passes on the first mutant, which is exactly the shape of a check that verifies nothing (see corpus and the passing wait condition note in the repository's known traps).

32 entries appended to bibliography before the closing </bibtex>, against a fresh ?do=export_raw of the live page rather than the stale workdir copy. Checks run before saving:

• key collisions against the live page: 0
• internal duplicates in the additions: 0
• DOI, normalised-title and URL collisions against the live page: 0 — a key-string check alone would not have caught the same paper already present under a different key
• 17 of the page's keys already existed and were reused rather than re-created — that is the check that matters most, because a second entry for the same paper under a new key breaks nothing visibly and corrupts the bibliography permanently: franken2018_cookiejar, karami2020_carnus, laperdrix2021_fingerprinting, agarwal2022_helping, agarwal2024_peeking, pantelaios2024_fv8, thomas2015_injection, borgolte2020_performance, bui2023_detection, ukani2025_local, trampert2025_cascading, demir2024_bannertools, torres2023_wallet, vekaria2025_bighelp, wang2026_masks, elhajjchehade2025_double, lukic2026_mv3

PoPETs and USENIX index records carry no authors and no DOI (100% of both venues), so those entries were built from the venue landing pages. scripts/fetch_authors.py returned affiliations glued into the author list for four of them (Berkeley, Santa Barbara, UC Davis, DeustoTech, Eurecom, UNIRC, UCL, UC3M); those were removed by hand. The two USENIX 2010 records added here share a legacy landing URL with no per-paper page, and their authors were read from the paper's own first page. Every URL in the additions file was then fetched: 16 of 16 return HTTP 200, after two USENIX slugs were corrected in review (see the reviewer log).

Five review passes, all told explicitly that the reviewer's own context may not be exhaustive and all handed a frozen snapshot of the page, the report script and its output, the external-check output, and this log. Corrections were applied after each pass returned, not while it was running, so each finding can be attributed to what the reviewer actually saw.

There is more than one freeze, and saying so matters, because a finding is only attributable if you know which text produced it. The three focused passes saw out/ext/freeze/; the generic pass of 2026-09-02 saw out/ext/freeze2/, the re-frozen copy taken after those passes' fixes were applied; the generic pass of 2026-09-22 saw out/ext/freeze3/, taken after the deferred findings below were closed. Until 2026-09-22 this paragraph said the same freeze and named only the first — which the 2026-09-02 pass flagged about itself, and which stood uncorrected for three weeks.

freeze3 was not a clean freeze either: the external-check re-run overwrote external.txt inside it while pass 5 was reading it, and pass 5 noticed and said so. Nothing in its findings depends on that file's live values, but it is the second time this page has made the same mistake, so it is recorded here rather than quietly fixed.

Rejections are recorded as carefully as fixes: they are the only evidence of whether a reviewer slot is worth its cost.

Re-ran scripts/external_checks_browser_extensions.sh independently and fetched every external claim from its primary source.

Re-ran both scripts independently and mutation-tested the guards.

Checked every citekey, every new BibTeX entry against the venue's own page or the paper's first page, every quoted sentence against the paper, and every external footnote against its source.

It returned after the pages were first published; its findings were applied in a follow-up save. Twelve findings, of which four were already fixed by the self-audit below (Edge/Opera, “Nobody does”, “Nobody has published it”, and two placeholder slots that were filled between the freeze it saw and publication) — it said so where it could tell. The rest:

The lesson this pass repeats. Three of its findings — the Torres novelty claim, the Manifest V2 over-reach, and the WAR-probing attribution — are each true in the sentence where they appear and false against a different section of the same page. That is the third run on this site where the generic pass earned its slot by reading the joins that no focused brief owns.

Run over out/ext/freeze3/ — the page, the provenance, the three scripts and their fresh outputs — after the deferred findings below were closed, so that the newest and least-reviewed material was the material under review. Twelve findings confirmed, five raised as suspected. It opened with a process note that is itself a finding: external.txt inside the frozen directory changed while it was reading it, because the external-check re-run overwrote it. That is pass 1's “the freeze was not a freeze” failure, committed again, by me.

What this pass says about the previous four. Six of its twelve findings are in material written the same day, by me, while closing the previous pass's deferred list: the stale 64, the overstated needle claim, the overstated external-check summary, the Carnus changelog, and two more. A correction is new, unreviewed text. The pass that reviews a fix is worth as much as the pass that found the defect, and this log had not been run that way before today.

The generic pass of 2026-09-02 accepted findings it did not have time to fix and recorded them as carried by an ext-generic-review work item. That item was never filed. They survived only because the two rows above recorded them, which is the argument for writing a deferred finding down in the same detail as a fixed one: for three weeks this log was the entire backing store.

They are two rows but six findings, which is itself worth noting — a deferred row that bundles three things is three things that can be lost together. All six reproduced exactly as described, and all six are now closed.

And one thing the deferred list did not contain. Closing the Carnus row and the people guard changed the needle count, and that exposed a number this page had been publishing three different ways for the same quantity: “60 of 60” in Quotes and per-paper figures, “the 64 needles” in the Pass 2 row below, and “the 70-needle per-paper check” in the 2026-09-21 quote-check refresh. The check has never been 70. 60 went stale the moment the citations pass added four needles, and nothing pointed at it, because the sentence that has to change is in a different section from the fix that changes it. All three are corrected, the figure is 66, and the sentence now says to re-run the script rather than quote it.

A process failure worth more than any of the findings. The prose file this provenance page is built from, pages/provenance_privacy_browser_extensions.txt, was three weeks stale: the markup sweep of 2026-09-17 and the quote-check refresh of 2026-09-21 were both edited straight onto the live page and never back- ported. Rebuilding with build_provenance_browser_extensions.py would have deleted both sections silently — the builder checks that no slot is empty, but it cannot check for content that only exists downstream of it. The prose file was reconstructed from the live page and the rebuild was then proved byte-identical to what was published before any of today's edits were applied. If you edit one of these pages in the browser, back-port it the same day, or the next build eats it.

Three errors survived all of the focused passes and were caught by re-reading the page against the corpus afterwards. They are the same shape, and the shape is worth naming: an absolute negative that no figure and no citation contradicts. A figures pass checks that every number traces to the report; a citation pass checks that every claim attached to a key is supported by that key's paper. Neither can see a sentence that says nobody, because there is no figure and no citation to check it against.

The general rule this run ends with: before a page ships, grep it for nobody, nothing, never, no one, the only and at all, and for each one name the query that supports it or scope the word. Every one of the three above would have been caught by that grep. None of them was caught by three reviewers.

That grep was then run over the whole page and produced seventeen hits. Nine were left alone because they are explicitly corpus-scoped and the report supports them (“the only paper in this corpus written from inside the store”; “nothing since asks whether extensions request more permission than they use”). Eight were rewritten, and one of those eight was a second real error of the same kind: “Edge … is currently the only mainstream store where the old platform is still live” — Firefox is the other, which the same page says two sections earlier. That is the “two sections meet” failure exactly, and it survived a figures pass, a citation pass and a currency pass because neither half of it is wrong on its own.

• The page this documents
• corpus — the dataset-wide provenance page: venue scope, selection funnel, extraction error rates
• browser_protection and requests — the two nearest neighbours, and the reason this page's boundary is drawn where it is

[1]

Somé, Dolière Francis (2019): "EmPoWeb: Empowering Web Applications with Browser Extensions", in: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. (DOI)

[2]

Sjösten, Alexander; Van Acker, Steven; Picazo-Sanchez, Pablo; Sabelfeld, Andrei (2019): "Latex Gloves: Protecting Browser Extensions from Probing and Revelation Attacks", in: Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. (Link)

[3]

Nguyen, Hoang Dai; Vadrevu, Phani (2025): "Breaking the Shield: Analyzing and Attacking Canvas Fingerprinting Defenses in the Wild", in: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference. (DOI)

[4]

El Hajj Chehade, Saiid; Stock, Ben; Troncoso, Carmela (2025): "Double-Edged Shield: On the Fingerprintability of Customized Ad Blockers", in: Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium. (Link)

[5]

Agarwal, Shubham; Fass, Aurore; Stock, Ben (2024): "Peeking through the window: Fingerprinting Browser Extensions through Page-Visible Execution Traces and Interactions", in: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. (DOI)

[6]

Chen, Quan; Kapravelos, Alexandros (2018): "Mystique: Uncovering Information Leakage from Browser Extensions", in: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. (DOI)

Mechanical rendering repair only: a fresh live raw/XHTML export of 188 pages was checked with check_wrap.mjs and check_typography.mjs. Affected plugin tags, CLI flags and heading markup were repaired; no figures or substantive prose were changed. The resulting source and rendered DOM were re-checked after saving.

The 2026-09-04 cols-vs-PDF audit on corpus showed that 73.1% of evidence quotes that cannot be located in paper.cols.txt are present in an independent pypdf rendering of the same paper.pdf. ext_quotecheck.mjs already carried the fallback; the verdict table in The extraction's own quotes was copied from a pre-fallback run. Re-run, unedited:

$ node scripts/ext_quotecheck.mjs
extension-corpus population tuples with a quote: 74
  exact:            54
  partial (>=60% of 5-word windows): 15
  rescued from the PDF: 4
  below threshold in BOTH renderings:  1   <- read these, do not count them as fabrications
    IEEE-SP/2011/verified-security-for-browser-extensions  n=1139  cov=0.56
      We conducted a simple analysis of manifests for over 1,139 popular Chrome extensions

What the refresh does not change. All five were already read by hand and all five are present, so no claim on browser_extensions rested on the 5. What it changes is the figure a reader would quote as this page's quote-failure rate: 1 of 74, not 5 of 74. And it exposes something worth stating — two of the four rescued are the two tuples the hand read calls paraphrases, so rescued is a statement about the rendering, not a warrant that the extraction is verbatim.

Scope of this edit. The verdict table and the paragraph under it. The per-paper needle check (64 needles on that date, not the 70 this sentence originally said), the store-size table, the population figures and every citation stand as published; report_browser_extensions.mjs was not re-run. browser_extensions carries no quote-check figure, so it was not edited.