> No they can't, despite mozilla removing the option to prevent this, I have an extension preventing website to run code in my browser without my permission. it happens to be one of the most popular firefox extension: noscript. (also umatrix and request policy).
You've conflated third party javascript with javascript in general. You can turn off javascript entirely, but unless you do so, that website is generally able to ship javascript to you as included scripts from the same domain or in a script section or inline with attribute handlers.
> No the browsers do not download changed version of themselves, they do not have the administrative permissions required to install programs on my box. I get my update from the official distro repository on my terms.
Yes, they very often do. Currently, they generally ask if you want to restart using the new version and give you that choice, but they are often downloading newer versions of themselves ahead of time to speed up this process.
Whether they have permissions depends entirely how you installed the application. If it wasn't installed globally, user permissions are all that is needed.
> I do not download and run programs, they come from the distro repository. This is a matter of trusting the package maintainers but up until now this has served many people well.
Good! I hope you've also never ever piped wget output to a shell for some application's quick installer. I also hope you've never installed any programming language module through that language's package manager and not your distro's package system, because those are notoriously bad at making sure there's not holes through which bad stuff can happen either.
Regardless, it's possible that the package you downloaded, no matter the source, can do something other than stated.
> It seems you guessed wrong and it does not work the same for everybody, some of us have chosen to take the extra step required for this kind of misadventure to be unlikely.
Actually, I don't think I guessed wrong because I wasn't guessing anything, and I never said it works the same for everybody. I believe, since I was careful to qualify my statements, that each is easily proven correct, and I've done so.