Hi, my name’s Aaron Powell and I’m a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. My area of specialty is front-end web dev and .NET (especially F#), but I enjoy doing silly things with technology.
It's a fine balance between performance, extensibility and reliability.
I do agree that you don't want to have extensions that can easily interfere with the operation of other extensions, if it was easy to disable extensions then you could end up with a malicious extension author messing with what's loaded.
Similarly, the more of the internals available to an extension the more you risk startup penalties because you have to make a larger sandbox.
Browsers suffer a similar problem, the more they allow you to do in an extension the more it risks the performance of the browser, and it's more often than not the browser that the finger gets pointed at than the extension.
I agree with you on those points. I haven't really looked into VSCode extensibility, but I had a sour experience with Visual Studio when developing an extension for changing text editor colors.
But nonetheless, I think the ability to disable extensions has a lesser impact than removing extensions if security is the concern. Said in another way, I believe being able to remove them is worst than being able to disable them.
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It's a fine balance between performance, extensibility and reliability.
I do agree that you don't want to have extensions that can easily interfere with the operation of other extensions, if it was easy to disable extensions then you could end up with a malicious extension author messing with what's loaded.
Similarly, the more of the internals available to an extension the more you risk startup penalties because you have to make a larger sandbox.
Browsers suffer a similar problem, the more they allow you to do in an extension the more it risks the performance of the browser, and it's more often than not the browser that the finger gets pointed at than the extension.
I agree with you on those points. I haven't really looked into VSCode extensibility, but I had a sour experience with Visual Studio when developing an extension for changing text editor colors.
But nonetheless, I think the ability to disable extensions has a lesser impact than removing extensions if security is the concern. Said in another way, I believe being able to remove them is worst than being able to disable them.