My web browsing just got interrupted by a new tab that opened without asking me, informing me of this acquisition. I have a 'one strike' rule for abusive behavior in extensions, and immediately removed it.
Then there is someone nearly the same who cries foul when they aren’t told a new company owns the extension. What if Google bought it and was going to harvest that “ability to read and change website data” permission?
Yeah, I dislike the intrusive nature of the notification, but I can't really think of a better way off the top of my head. The notification API could work in theory, but if you don't already have that permission it would be odd to request it just for a one-time message like this.
I'm assuming that an extension update is precisely what triggered this behavior. It sounds like the extension had no need for alert functionality, and that this was a first occurrence, so I'd also assume they had to add code to trigger an alert rather than just blasting a brand new alert to users via written but previously-unused code.
Sublime Text extensions do this too, quite annoying when you open an editor for for a quick note and several seconds in the typing focus switches to a new tab. Of course, browser extensions that do this are annoying too, especially when you get bombarded by new tabs if you didn't use the browser in a while. This is so user-hostile, how come the issue wasn't tackled by browser vendors yet?
several seconds in the typing focus switches to a new tab
I've never understood why operating systems allow focus switching.
It's always been a pox on Windows, but macOS does this more and more these days. Just this morning, I plugged in a USB hard drive, then returned to my other work while it mounted. Suddenly, I'm typing a memo into Finder's password field to unlock the drive. Just. Stop. It.
If you need my attention, there is no shortage of methods to do that — Beep. Bounce the icon in the dock. Notifications messages. Your stupid program is not more important than whatever I'm doing at that moment in time.
> Suddenly, I'm typing a memo into Finder's password field to unlock the drive. Just. Stop. It.
Normally I would lol at your misfortune but I actually got bitten by this too.
I restarted after a macOS update (remember when they used to update in the background and now every one requires a restart like Windows?) and 1Password needed my master password to unlock in the browser but apparently Messages app took a few seconds to load and when I saw the notification to enter my 1Pass master password I started typing and at that moment Messages took focus and I typed my master password into a message and hit enter to send.
Thankfully it was to my girlfriend, but still wtf.
The worst is when the application activates itself but isn't actually done loading or ready for user input. It's like the spam call I received once that immediately asked me to hold for the next available operator when I picked up the phone.
microsoft teams is the worst for this. It'll be loading for 10s, during which it will actually steal focus _multiple times_! (and then I have to login to my university account in order to logOUT of my university account so that I can login to my work account. What a marvelous piece of engineering.)
Agree, but the flip side of this is that occasionally Windows will prompt for admin access in the background, I won't notice, and a hour later wonder what happened to that app i tried to install.
I'm not a regular Windows users, but I believe Windows has lots of other ways to get people's attention, other than stealing it. Isn't that what the icon tray is for? Or blinking the program in the task bar?
No, when windows pops the admin auth prompt into the background the best and most reliable way to notice is to intuit that such a window should have appeared by now and go looking for it.
To name one use case off the top of my head. I use KeePassXC's autotype feature to fill in passwords all the time. That wouldn't work if it was prevented by the OS from switching focus.
It's like with phone apps. Every single phone app thinks it is the centre of the universe and is "only" sending you a few notifications per day, but if you extend this to every app on your phone you'll get hundreds a day and the only recourse is to disable them entirely.
Teachers: "My students are smart and diligent, 30min of homework per day should be well within their abilities"
Students: have 4 hours of homework per day
The latest app that needs their notifications disabled on my phone is Amazon. Shame really, knowing about packages was useful. But I really don't need spam about "Hey this thing you glanced at is on sale now" every 2 days.
DoorDash is terrible at this too. Notice that when you turn notifications off on these apps then every time you open them to use them, you get popups "please enable notifications to keep up to date on your orders!!" and the options are always "Yes enable notifications!" or "Remind me later" Excuse me, I disabled notifications for a reason, don't make me disable usage of your app completely.
Oh yeah UberEats was one of the first notification permissions to go. Sorry I’d rather check my phone every 2 minutes when awaiting delivery than deal with you on the other 95% of days.
Why not disable all notifications by default? Is there something you actually really want to get interrupted by? I want to know when I get a call or an text, but pretty much everything else can wait until I'm actively engaged with it.
Every new app I installed gets every permission I can disable disabled including notifications and if it continues to function well enough for my needs why let it do anything more? Why even give new apps opportunity to be obnoxious?
> Every single phone app thinks it is the centre of the universe and is "only" sending you a few notifications per day, but if you extend this to every app on your phone you'll get hundreds a day and the only recourse is to disable them entirely.
Is there a general name for this sort of bias? It's not just phone apps and notifications; I notice this center of the universe attitude in developers of all kinds of auxiliary programs. Chat app programmers who think that quip "unused ram is wasted ram", which they learned in the context of the OS caching files in ram, gives their chat app license to use as much ram as the user may have. It ignores all the other programs the user is probably running that are much more important than their chat app. To the chat app developer, the chat app is the center of the universe and the user has no use for any of their ram besides running the chat app.
Why much I jump through countless hoops just to make it so a third party doesn't have the ability to take over the full screen and audio of the device I was actively using?
Ideally an incoming call would only vibrate the device briefly and put an icon in the status bar. That's it.
Instead, I don't remember what I did anymore but it's completely suppressed on my device now. It's actually worked out OK because I don't give my number to anyone new and anyone who does know it also knows by now that I don't pick up and to contact me some other way. Means that ~100% of incoming calls are spam and my device is correctly filtering them all to /dev/null
In my experience this is fairly common for "what's changed" listings for extensions. It's probably mostly to do with how browsers don't provide any good native mechanism for that.
It's a pretty safe bet you can throw any mail that has "IMPORTANT" printed on the envelope in the trash.
Every online store, software vendor and web site wishes they could get my attention for an "IMPORTANT" message at least 100x more often than I wish they did.
Browser extensions already have access to privileged APIs that websites cannot use, however, so providing this ability to extensions !== providing it to medium.com.
The kind of company that would abuse an extension API like this for marketing is just the kind of company I wouldn't trust for extensions, so even spammy marketing messages would still be a useful signal (to uninstall).
I do care - I install tools because they're useful, and if they become more useful from new features, that's useful to know. I've definitely found some good gems to improve my workflow that I don't think I'd have discovered without the changelog.
What I don't particularly care about is "performance optimizations and bug fixes". If that's all you have to say about your latest release, just don't bother telling me. I suspect that's where some of the fatigue from release notes comes from.
I recently received a phone call from Dexcom, since they make a continuous glucose monitor that I wear. The call was to warn me not to upgrade to iOS 16 as their app would immediately crash and I wouldn’t be able to view my blood sugar. I was told a fix was being deployed and I would receive an email when it was safe to upgrade.
Sure enough, a week later I received an email saying it was safe to upgrade to iOS 16, provided I updated the app in the App Store first.
And as frustrated as I was that a company that large with a product so safety critical had waited literally months after the iOS betas before testing iOS16, I was more frustrated when I read the release notes for this incredibly important update:
In most cases yes, but a change in ownership is definitely something I want to know about.
I'd prefer a less intrusive way of notifying me of the change, but in this case the extension in question is one that works passively in the background, and doesn't have a UI that users regularly interact with. I can't really think of a better way to inform people, except maybe via the notification API?
Do you have push-to-talk enabled, or a keybind for toggle-mute? That's a super abusable permission and this isn't to say they aren't abusing it, but there is a reason for it to exist.
Part of that is handling the Discord overlay. So, when you are in a game, and you are in a Discord VC, you can display who is talking. There are keyboard shortcuts that come along with that which you can use if you want.
In order to detect those keyboard short cuts, they need to listen for them.
You are free to not give them permission.
Posting about asking permission under a comment talking about "abusive" behavior is a bit odd.
Opening a new tab telling you about changes in the ownership of a piece of software that has the ability to open tabs autonomously is not abusive. Moreover it is not even a problem with the extension, it is a problem with the opersting system it runs on.
Analogously, i am sure that discord would have preferred to have finer control over the permissions it requests, but Apple's mission is security theater. If apple exposed a set of "application specific out of focus keybinds". The security breach would not be necessary.
As it stands lots of software in the apple ecosystem has identical permissions to discord, but those don't get scary warnings associated to them. This constitutes a (clearly illegal) competitive advantage for Apple and they have no interest in removing this advantage by offering finer permissions controls, even in the case where they do not offer competing software.
What an odd complaint. The annoyance of 1 pop-up is negligible compared to the extreme usefulness of letting me know that the extension was acquired. That is what makes me uninstall the extension.
That sounds like somethign that should happen on new window launch or after a relaunch of app kind of thing. For the browser to just randomly open a tab is very uncool
