A self‑taught developer tackled the Mozilla Add‑ons API to pull every Firefox extension, ending with 84,235 unique entries. The effort revealed a surprisingly small catalog—under 50 GB of code, averaging 585 kB per add‑on. The project showcases how public APIs can become data mining gold mines.

Initially, the search endpoint returned only 30,000 results, forcing the author to experiment with sorting by creation, rating, hotness, and updated timestamps. Even then, missing entries lingered until parallel requests and category‑specific queries filled the gaps. The final dataset, now hosted on Hugging Face, offers a comprehensive snapshot for researchers and security analysts.

Analysis of the collection exposed some outliers: the largest add‑on, *dmitlichess*, swallows 196 MB of audio files, while the smallest, *theTabs‑saver*, sits at just 7.5 kB. The study also highlighted security risks, noting several extensions that harvest seed phrases. The dataset now serves as a baseline for vulnerability scans and market studies.

By automating the scrape, the author eliminated repetitive manual work and provided the community with a ready‑to‑use resource that can be leveraged for audits, performance research, and extension ecosystem overviews.