I was looking for a solution to get rid of the Activities menu in Ubuntu and came upon the GNOME Extensions website. I'm honestly very confused about it. I read the whole About page and it still doesn't make sense.

The site states: "To control GNOME Shell extensions using this site you must install GNOME Shell integration that consists of two parts: browser extension and native host messaging application."

Does this mean that website will changes to my core system? That seems more like a hack than an application.

Am I misunderstanding something here? Some of the extensions seem useful but I'm not real comfortable letting a website control my computer.

I've never used it (I don't like Gnome), but I found what I think is a helpful article.

My reading is that it does not change the core system, but only adds some capability to the Gnome Desktop. Maybe it's just me, but I do not configure the DE/WM part of the "core system."

That is an "interesting" solution to manage packages: the native host messaging application is just something like a background process to be able to communicate with the system and the gnome shell integration is actually a package management software which is used to install "extensions" to your existing gnome environment.
Nowadays we have several attempts to ignore/skip the default package management software of the distro and use a different one, which will be able to manage the software in question regardless of the host OS.

I think you're absolutely correct to feel uncomfortable about that; although it doesn't exactly amount to "letting a website control my computer" - it's more like an app store a lá Google Playstore.

And, installing an extension to simply disable a feature of the desktop seems more than ridiculous to me. Maybe there's other ways to achieve the same (apart from dropping GNOME altogether).

I would definitely like to find that other way. I find the Activities menu redundant and useless and something that just disrupts my workflow. I do like the GNOME DE but the activities menu keeps causing me to seek out other options. If I could just get that Activities menu to go away I'd be more than happy.

I think you need to go back to your post in that other thread, and figure out why that "doesn't work".
You know, do some troubleshooting. If that doesn't get you there, post some details, commands & output...

I was asking questions about the GNOME extensions website here, not trying to solve the issue I have with the Activities menu. And, BTW, if you actually read the other post, I stated the issue I have with the Activities menu and what I've done (including the command I ran) to try to solve it. I'm sorry I'm not a Linux genius and have to seek assistance in a forum that's intended for that exact purpose.