How to Remove Firefox Extension Delay

Everybody loves Firefox because its wide range of plugins or extensions to choose from. Wondering where to look for Alexa ranking plugin or anything under the sun; you can always find them in its large repository over at Firefox Add-On. There is, however, a small thing that bugs Firefox user when they are about to initiate a plugin installation; the notorious 3-second delay.

You might wonder why it's there in the first place and here is the explanation.

Firefox’s solution, from bug 162020, is to delay enabling the “Yes”/”Install” buttons until three seconds after the dialog appears. I believe that this is the only possible fix other than completely denying untrusted content the ability to pose the dialog. Unfortunately, this fix is frustrating for users who install extensions often.

Some users have been intentionally lowering the delay to 0 seconds, which frustrates me. These users think the delay was added merely to force everyone to read the dialog. I surprises me that these users were not able to figure out the security hole given the fix.

If you use Firefox plugin lightly like me you might not be as disturbed as people who love to play around with new plugins in Firefox Add-Ons arsenal.

Solution

This can be done in any version of firefox.

1. Type in "about:config" in address bar.
2. Click on "I'll be careful, I promise!"
3. Find "security.dialog_enable_delay" and set it to zero and you are done!

Please be reminded, removing the delay might expose you to unexpected security breach. You may want to read this article to get better picture of the situation and why the delay is implemented in Firefox in the first place. As far as my laptop is concerned, it never fails to be up and running as usual like every other day :)

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