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I've just looked into this, it seems Chrome displays that because of the "tabs" permission:

> "Technically this permission allows observing the history via chrome.tabs.onUpdated, but not read the previously existing history, so the phrasing is not entirely correct, strictly speaking."

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64063754/chrome-extensio...

To be clear, the extension doesn't access your browsing history at all. The "tabs" permission is just used to find Wikipedia tabs and enable/disable the new design when using the toggle from the browser popup.

The permissions requested (in the manifest.json file) are:

  "permissions": [
    "tabs",
    "storage",
    "*://*.wikipedia.org/*"
  ]
I will change that to "activeTab" in the next update which should fix it.



Note that you could also make it a bookmarklet which requires no permissions and only accesses the current tab when the user clicks it. Would be nice for trying out how it looks, given how little it changes I was expecting this would be a little bookmarklet and was a bit disappointed I had to add an extension to my browser for trying the look.


A bookmarklet would have to be clicked every time you open a new wikipedia page. I think it would be more productive to just fix the main permission issue (can view entire browsing history - author says in a comment they'll be fixing it). Chrome also lets you keep the extension inactive - you can easily activate it on-demand from the toolbar. If you do that on a minimal-permission extension, you have the equivalent of a bookmarklet.


thanks for responding here and reducing permissions.




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