[kagbor]

This is a problem with how poorly extension permissions are handled by the browsers. There needs to be a way to gracefully ask a user for permanent (and configurable) extended permissions without it being an earth shattering event.

My experience: I have a moderately popular extension that initially only supported a couple sites so I set the permissions accordingly. I would extend permissions every time I added support for another site. However, with each permission increase my extension gets completely disabled for every user with a very scary warning that suggests something nefarious is happening. With each permission update I would lose HALF of my users. My alternatives are activeTab (awful user experience) or just being greedy with my permissions. I went with the latter.

[EvilTerran]

Could you not use permissions.request() [0] to ask for access to a given site on-the-fly, when the user actually visits it? That seems to be how, for example, Reddit Enhancement Suite goes about getting perms for all the various sites it supports embedding content from (imgur, twitter etc) - you get a prompt when you click to open an embed for a site you haven't granted the permission for already.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...