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Feature Request: Extension Permission - On Click

The "On Click" extension permission would only run the extension when it's icon is clicked. The permission should remain granted until the page is no longer loaded or the tab is closed.

Chrome offers this:

Use case:
I would like to have the Wayback Machine extension installed, but it loads a bunch of information about the current page on every visit - using bandwidth and giving away my browsing history. This extension is only useful to me on some pages, but I wont know ahead of time which sites I need to use it so I can't whitelist them.

If I use the current "Ask for every site" permission, the permission dialog pops up on every new page I visit. If I deny it for that page on one visit, then end up on a page that is no longer available on another visit, I would have to go through the settings to enable it for that site. If I allow it for a site, it now runs for every page on that site, every time I visit.

Other extension types that this works well for:

  • Reader mode / dark mode / Unclutter type extensions
  • Cookie / local storage / websocket / service worker / site information extensions (IP Address and Domain Information, Wappalyzer, ...)
  • Developer tools extensions
  • Bookmarking / save for later (SingleFile]/ share this type extensions
  • any extension I "may" want to run on any given page but doesn't need to run at all if I don't use it on that page
  • any extension that is useful on any random website that I don't want to grant permanent "Allow for all websites" permission and don't want to deal with the permission dialog for every site if I use the "Ask for every site" permission

    Interesting idea.

      5 months later

      This is also useful for shopping/discount extensions like Honey. Normally I don't want them running, but when I get to a checkout page and it's time to put in the discount code I'd like to be able to click and activate the extension.

        grant I agree it makes sense. What makes it tricky is that when the extension is disabled, we disable and grey it out in the interface so that user knows it is disabled. What should we do for 'onclick' extensions?

            The current behavior is to not show disabled extensions at all.

            However, if you wanted to show disabled greyed out I think that is fine too. And it would be fine to also show the on-click extensions greyed out in the same way. Both disabled and on-click are disabled, displaying them the same is not misleading the user. Clicking on a disabled extension presumably does nothing? While clicking on a on-click would turn it on (for the remainder of the page visit? I'm not sure how Chrome on-click works)

            • Vlad replied to this.

              grant It is not intuitive to click on disabled extension. The state of disabled and 'alive, listening' for click should be different visually.

                  7 months later

                  Vlad Extensions not active for the current page are greyed out and red x'ed like so:

                  I propose on-click extensions be greyed out and have a little mouse pointer put in the bottom right corner instead of the red x.

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