Add visual indication when ExtensionSettings policy affects an extension |
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Issue descriptionThe ExtensionSettings policy allows an administrator to define a list of sites that Extensions should not be able to modify. This has the effect of blocking certain actions like content script injection depending on the site. This is made evident to developers via error messages in the console. End users however don't have an easy way of understanding why an extension may behave differently on certain websites. To increase transparency to the user we propose to introduce a visual indicator. This change would affect the chrome://extensions page to indicate that an extension's behavior has been restricted. This notice should help users understand that an extension has been affected and where they can go for more information or an exception. Such a notice would only appear after an action has been blocked to reduce the chance of false positives. I've attached a Mock screenshot of how this could look.
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Feb 15 2018
Issue 811071 has been merged into this issue.
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Feb 15 2018
There should also be a visual indicator on the extension icon (the one to the right of the omnibar), while visiting policy blocked sites. At a minimum, the extension icon should turn gray to indicate it's disabled. Clicking on the disabled extension icon should explain that the policy blocked the extension on the current site.
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Feb 15 2018
unfortunately, greying it out isn't sufficient for some. consider extensions that only do CSS content injection via manifest.json and otherwise has no JS logic. the icon is (currently) always grey, even if the CSS is being injected correctly.
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Feb 15 2018
Got it. In that case, grayed out, plus red 'X' through the icon… or whatever UX chromium team thinks makes the most sense. The only concern I have is that I don't think that only a notification on the chrome://extensions is sufficient UX for *users*.
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Feb 15 2018
i agree that displaying only in chrome://extensions isn't sufficient. it's a good start, but as you said, this impacts more than developers of an extension, so we prob want to do multiple things.
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Feb 17 2018
I'll second the need for user-visible indicators. Without that the user is led to believe that the extension is broken, sending waves of unwarranted reports to extension developers — I can vouch for that through first-hand experience, and it wasn't a pleasant one. On that note: (a) +1 for providing a banner under chrome://extensions with an explanation for why the extension is blocked. This is useful for debugging but not sufficient to address the user perception problem. (b) The *extra* confusing part today is that while the extension is blocked, the extension icon is still visible: you can click on it, you can even load background pages, etc., but content scripts are blocked and that makes it appear that extension is "working but broken". This is terrible UX. As others already suggested, if we're blocking the extension we should have a user-visible indicator that the policy is active (e.g. grey out the icon, add some policy log overlay, etc) and, ideally, provide some message when clicked explaining that it's disabled by policy, or send them to Chrome help page explaining what the icon is and what its implications are.
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Feb 17 2018
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Apr 13 2018
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Jul 3
Assigning to nrpeter@, feel free to reassign accordingly. |
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Comment 1 by macourteau@chromium.org
, Feb 14 2018Owner: blumberg@chromium.org
Status: Assigned (was: Untriaged)