Firefox extension creates an annoying notification all the time

Ilya

I installed the Kagi Search for Firefox extension on Mac OS, and it started to pop up a green notification circle each time I open a new site (see the two small green circles in the screenshot). This is mostly cosmetic, but irritating, since more important notifications by other extensions would be hidden.

This seems to be related to the fact that it doesn't have permission to read or change the data until I click on it.

If I do click on the extension, it opens a "Summarize the current page" window, and the green circles disappear.

The config to not allow the extension access until click seems fine to me and does not merit a notification.

brn

Thanks for reporting this @Ilya !

As mentioned in https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions/issues/19#issuecomment-1753029583 , when you're using the summarizer, it's just how Firefox tells you the extension is asking for permissions it doesn't yet have (for that tab in that session). We can't change that without asking for more permissions.

Ilya

IMO, if you can't find a better way, this would be a good enough reason to make a separate extension for the Summarizer. That extension can ask for more permissions.

It's a bit strange that Firefox doesn't provide a better solution -- there is a whole world of extensions that would need access to the webpage, but only if you click on them; Summarizer is similar to all kinds of "Reading Mode" extensions in this way. Creating a notification for such extensions on every page is bizarre, since the user shows their disinterest in the functionality of the extension by not clicking on it.

I'm pretty sure that if this problem persists, I'll have to uninstall the extension. Fortunately, I think that's workable thanks to search engine extensions like Search Engines Helper. (Not sure if it's the best one; it's a bit awkward to use, but it works well enough that I didn't look for another)

Vlad

Ilya

IMO, if you can't find a better way, this would be a good enough reason to make a separate extension for the Summarizer. That extension can ask for more permissions.

We are reluctant to do this. Managing one extension is already cumbersome and it makes sense for Kagi related features to be in Kagi extension.

Perhpas it would be worth considering raising issue with Mozilla to change this practice?

hmnd

Vlad @Ilya I found this bug report on Bugzilla. Could be worth voicing our support there (not that Firefox has a great track record of taking action on bug reports...)

Ilya

@hmnd Thanks for finding the bug! I "followed" it; that seems to be the only way to +1 it without commenting (which I didn't want to do since I don't have any new information for them).

The way it's marked with Priority: P3, Severity S3 is not encouraging.

One point from the bug is that this only affects Manifest V3 extensions. I'm not sure whether Manifest V2 extensions are less buggy or always ask for more permissions.

@Vlad I understand your reluctance, supporting two extensions is more work. I don't know how much more work making a "Kagi Lite" extension would be.

For the one data point that is me: I realized that I don't have any other extensions that use this notification in any useful way, so I think I can get used to it. So, at the moment, this seems like a minor annoyance I can get used to, and I might not immediately uninstall the extension (haven't yet, at least). However, once (and if) I find another extension where this green dot provides useful information, I'll uninstall the Kagi extension.

One other thing you could do is to provide better instructions on how to use Kagi on Firefox without the extension, with something like the "Search Engine Helper" I linked to above. Unfortunately, AFAICT Firefox does all it can to make this tricky and unpleasant (but fortunately not quite impossible). If I try it out and have any thoughts on what those instructions could say, specifically, I'll write them down here or in some other Kagi forum.

And by the way, thanks for working on Kagi, I'm enjoying it quite a bit!

Vlad

Ilya

I understand your reluctance, supporting two extensions is more work. I don't know how much more work making a "Kagi Lite" extension would be.

Well this is why they are open source so anyone can create their own kagi lite version if they so want 🙂 we'd like to focus our scarce resources on making search better for everyone.

One other thing you could do is to provide better instructions on how to use Kagi on Firefox without the extension

I believe we already have this in documentation https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html#firefox_browsers

If this feels not complete either let us know or edit the docs yourself, they are open-source too.

Fracture

I am not sure if this is the same but the green light under the kagi extension is extremely annoying

Ilya

I think it's the same.

To describe my own experience in the past months, I followed the instructions to use Kagi without the extensions.

But that didn't help forever: perhaps unsurprisingly, Kagi is far from the only extension doing this. I started using another extension ("Tabby") that has this same annoying behavior, so I had to get used to a useless green light anyway.

So, I think this is a Firefox problem (bug, also mentioned in the thread above).

Fracture

Ilya

the problem seems to be that it is asking for permissions, so how can I grant it the permissions it asks and avoid the annoying green light. Bitwarden and ublockorigin is not doing this for me

Ilya

It's a matter of whether it's a "Manifest v2" extension or "Manifest v3" extension. More and more extensions will start using Manifest v3 all the time; perhaps Firefox will try to address the bug once enough extensions switch. You can find a lot of ink spilled over the Manifest v3 transition on the interwebs; suffices to say this transition is not the smoothest one. It feels more of a "X steps forward, Y steps back" kind of thing to me where there are varying opinions of whether X>Y or not.

I don't think you can do much about it.

Ilya

The "optional permissions" mentioned in https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/05/14/manifest-v3-updates/ sound a little promising.

Vlad

I am wondering if this is still the issue?

Fracture

Vlad

its gone. Rejoice!