[jfoster]

It's been a while since I dabbled in Chrome extensions, but if nothing has changed, then not as a Chrome extension, unfortunately. If you mean theoretically, then of course; Chrome could let extensions subscribe to particular event hooks and whatnot and get very fine-grained about it. I expect that would actually be too fine-grained for most users, but what they have at the moment is a system where installing almost any extension feels quite risky. I'm not sure that Google really want Chrome extensions to exist, though. It feels like a very neglected part of Chrome.

[prashantb]

On the last part, I agree with you from a developer's point of view as well. The review process is a shambles at the moment. Sometimes the review process can take weeks and one can still get rejected with no explanation. I understand the need for a manual review when an extension asks for powerful permissions like this one does but an approval time of more than a week is a bit much. And every subsequent update to the extension (even a small description change) also goes through the same review process. Imagine a critical bug fix taking more than a week for approval! It feels like they want to shut down their doors for individual developers. In comparison, firefox took only 2 hours to approve the same extension.

[ajayyy]

Firefox only does manual reviews on "Recommended Extensions"

[jdc]

I expect that would actually be too fine-grained for most users [...]

Even with that level of detail on the backend, there's no need to expose it all the user by default. That is, you could tell the user about group various related events together (eg. mouse, page load, etc) and power users could also drill-down if they like.

[jfoster]

Yeah, that would be a good way to do it.