Information on conflicts between enabled extensions

[Tom Riley]

We've had a problem recently with another extension breaking ours, and I wondered if anyone could point me to any documentation on how this is handled?

The docs page for `webRequest` has some information about conflicts, but I feel like the general subject of conflicts must be covered in more depth, since extensions can break each other easily without the user knowing from permission warnings etc.

Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction 🙏

[Patrick Kettner]

Hey Tom

Break in what way? Generally there isn’t a ton of guidance outside of communicate with the owner of the other extension. If it is malicious action, you can report it to one stop support and we will investigate if either extension is acting in a way no compliant with the chrome web store policies. 

patrick

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[Tom Riley]

Thanks Patrick, in this case it was another extension not resolving the promise expected from a listener it added for `webRequest.onAuthRequired`. So, our listener for the same auth challenge couldn't complete the authentication. The purpose of our extension is for customers to connect to our proxy network, so the bug stops our customers being able to do use our service.

Luckily the other extension devs are being cooperative and agree they'll work on a fix, but if that had not been the case then it seems we'd have been pretty powerless to do much about it or even do a release that recognises the issue and warns the user somehow. It seems like a bit of a loose end that extensions can break each other so easily and there aren't many tools to detect or deal with it, or automatic warnings based on the permissions each is using or something...

[woxxom]

Technically what you described is a bug in Chrome. It should handle this situation gracefully e.g. at least enforce a timeout for the onAuthRequired listener's response. It'd be also helpful to show a panel under the tab strip with buttons to cancel the extension's listener or wait a little more after waiting for say 5 seconds.

[Tom Riley]

Thanks all, I've filed a bug with Chromium.