Proposal: action.default_area=navbar and action.default_area=hidden

[carlosjeurissen]

Background

Mozilla Firefox supports the default_area property of the action manifest key. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/browser_action#syntax

In addition, Google Chrome nowadays hides extension action buttons in an "extensions" dropdown menu. To keep the interface clean and show all installed extensions in this menu.

Use case

For some extensions, it's very important to be directly pinned from the start especially when the extension has a menu of options, like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks-menu/ffmdedmghpoipeldijkdlcckdpempkdi
Hiding the extension icons by default hurts the core features of such extensions. Not all extensions purpose are to act on the current page but just add additional UI to the browser.

This info could then be used by the browser to offer pin suggestions, like proposed in #199.

Solution

My proposal is to add support for the values hidden and navbar for action.default_area in all browsers. This allows the extension developer to indicate to a browser whether or not it's important to be pinned by default. The browser can then decide if and how in their UI they want to facilitate this.

The value navbar would indicate the webExtension prefers to be pinned right from the start. While the value none would indicate the webExtension is not at all interested in being exposed in the UI. This value could be ignored by browsers who prefer to always display extension icons for transparency and security reasons.