[EMM_386]

I completely agree with all of this. It can be done without any of this server-side stuff.

But to answer the question:

> Why does anything need to be transmitted anywhere?

It's because the extension is written by, and "powered by", MagicBell. They are writing it to bring attention to their product concept, where notifications like this are all handled by them.

[danShumway]

That's totally fair, but it raises a followup question because from what I can see, MagicBell has user accounts.

So that's also a unique identifier that they could use to prevent collisions. They could have a randomized ID generated locally for this "promotional" extension, and if a user creates an account on MagicBell at that point they could migrate them over to an official user ID.

If this is being tied to a real backend service, I'm almost more confused why it's important to transmit my session cookies around.