How would you implement navigating within the page without executing in the context of the page? For example, jump to the next form field requires finding the form fields.
By having chrome build explicit support for this kind of stuff, and creating an API around it.
It seems plausible for Google to inspect its top 500 extensions, and figure out a set of APIs that support all of those needs without giving unlimited read/write/network/execution access to the extension. Just look at how Safari created their own Adblock API thats faster/more memory efficient without giving away URLs to the part of the extension that has network access. This model should be expanded upon.
I'm being serious. It's been a long time since I've developed a Chrome extension so I don't follow them, but it seems to be me that is a good start but there are many areas where Chrome (and other browsers) could go even more fine-grained.
I'm not sure why it's unpopular here (perhaps its implementation vs concept?), but it seems to me that with the realities of malware constantly being distributed through extensions in addition to the obvious privacy issues, that many reasonable people would wish to see this evolution.
Personally I use almost zero browser extensions because of these issues.
So if that’s true, then they’re not doing as I suggested: take a fine-grained approach to the top 500 extensions (including adblocking) to make it possible to create them without having full read/write dom + networking. I believe the content blocking APIs in Safari are a great start and could be taken so much further.
It seems plausible for Google to inspect its top 500 extensions, and figure out a set of APIs that support all of those needs without giving unlimited read/write/network/execution access to the extension. Just look at how Safari created their own Adblock API thats faster/more memory efficient without giving away URLs to the part of the extension that has network access. This model should be expanded upon.