Extensions can help you turn a bare-bones browser into a powerhouse for productivity and efficiency. However, it's important to be aware of what add-ons we're adding to our browser, as most of us don't think twice about adding extensions from your browser's official store page.

But some extensions aren't available on these stores, and require you to download them directly. The bad news is that these extension pages are often not as well-maintained or moderated as the Play Store or the App Store. So, today, we'll see how downloading such unknown extensions puts you at risk.

1. Exposure to Security Risks

Developer working on devices

The biggest risk of using unknown extensions is that they can either be highly unsafe or even downright malicious. A good number of these unknown extensions can expose you to security risks such as malware, phishing attacks, and identity theft. You never know how an unknown extension was developed and how many liabilities it could have in its code-base.

Some of these extensions also might come packed with ads that can redirect you to malicious websites and popups. On top of that, there have been plenty of extensions that have leaked user data in the past. Those add-ons weren't even relatively unknown, so you can only guess what's going on behind the scenes with these random extensions.

2. They Can Slow Down Your Browser

Frustrated man at work
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Extensions usually help you speed up your workflow. However, using unknown extensions can often have the opposite effect. Most of these unknown extensions are not optimized for performance. They are usually developed by third-party companies, and since they're not designed to be fully compatible with every browser, performance dips are a common issue.

These issues arise because of memory leaks and extra resource usage. Both of these things significantly impact the performance of your browser. A slow browser also leads to a slow PC experience overall. If your browser is hogging too much memory, your PC might feel sluggish.

So, if your browser feels slow all of a sudden, and you recently installed an unknown extension, then you have your culprit. While there are ways to speed up your browsing, if you have unoptimized extensions, your experience will be subpar.

3. Privacy Concerns

Security cameras monitoring

A lot of these unknown extensions are free, but there's a catch. There's a good saying in the tech industry that if something is free, you are the product. Since these extensions are free, a majority of them will find malicious ways to make money.

The most common method of doing this involves collecting your data and selling it to advertisers. Extensions usually do this by tracking your online activities like browsing history, search queries, and site data. These random unknown companies can then sell this data to advertisers for targeted advertising. Selling this data could also lead to even severer problems like identity theft.

Another important thing to note is that when you install an extension, you're unknowingly granting it random permissions. With these, extensions could access your activity, files, or even your camera. Go to your browser's extension settings menu, find the extension in question, and consider what you are handing over control to a random company.

4. Lack of Support

People working at call center

Most browsers are updated often, and with those updates come patches and slight modifications that change the overall functionality. More often than not, extensions need to be updated according to these changes to avoid issues. If they aren't updated automatically, you'll encounter random crashes, browser instability, and slowdowns.

You'll also find that most of these extensions don't have any customer support. Since a lot of these extensions are free, many companies couldn't care less about any issues that you may run into while using them. This is why you should always check the update log of these extensions to make sure they are updated timely.

5. Compatibility Issues

Frustrated woman working on laptop

According to Statista, nearly 65% of people use Google Chrome as their preferred browser. As such, most of the extensions are usually made for Chrome first and then ported to other browsers. However, compatibility is not a major issue as most of the popular extensions are cross-compatible and can run on other browsers without any problems.

On the other hand, an extension with poor browser compatibility can lead to a horrible overall experience. Because of the performance issues we discussed above, if an extension is just lazily ported over to another browser, it's a recipe for disaster.

Inconsistency is also a major issue. An extension might work well on Chrome but cause issues if you try to use it on Firefox or Edge. For those of you that work with multiple browsers, this can be quite an issue when you're trying to switch between them seamlessly.

6. No Reviews or Reputation

Group of people celebrating

Like anything else, it's always important to read reviews before you download or purchase any piece of software. It's a given to read reviews when you're buying physical items, but people tend to ignore this for digital downloads. This is especially true for freeware. Since it only takes a minute or two to download an extension, it's possible that you might overlook reviews.

Of course, doing so might lead you to encounter all the issues we encountered above. A good rule of thumb is to only download extensions that have four stars or more. If you absolutely need to download one, and it only has three stars, be sure to read the reviews and see if the issues people are reporting on are serious.

Stick to Tried and Trusted Extensions

If you have a habit of downloading and using unknown extensions, we highly recommend doing otherwise. Apart from just the security risks and effects on performance, it's a bad practice to download relatively unknown software in general. To protect your privacy and system security, it's better to stick to the popular browser add-ons.

There's also no real need to download these random extensions anyway. No matter how niche your use case might be, you'll always find a good, reputable extension that can help you out. A quick Google or Reddit search likely has your answer. There are plenty of ways to ensure your extensions are safe, so make sure you take advantage of them.