Maximum 255 characters for setUninstallURL

[Jean Lomdes]

Hi,

The limit to 255 characters seems very low for an URL. 

Any reason to not increase in the thousands ? 

Thank you,

Jean

[Deco]

This is one of the odd functions which doesn't have an explicit reason, even the MDN which is derived from the Chromium interface does not have a good reason other than browser unity. 

Discussion on it's implementation goes back over a decade, you can see the rationale here for why it's set to 255: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84556#c13

> "I'm less worried about (1). As you said, if it was evil to start with, I don't think we're extending it's capabilities much here. The bigger concern I'd have is if this somehow had the ability to interfere with the actual uninstall behavior. For example, I wouldn't want it to be able to pop up any dialogs, to delay the install by blocking, or to live beyond the livespan of the event's synchronous behavior. Uninstall should still synchronously result in the extension being uninstalled. Even if we designed it with this behavior, I'd be a bit worried about bugs that an attacker could exploit. I don't want to be in a situation where extensions are considered persistent malware.

For (2), one option would be that we could allow the extension to set some uninstall cookie (e.g. chrome.extension.setUninstallToken("xxx")) which could be made available to the uninstall page".

Cheers,

Deco

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[Oliver Dunk]

We have an open Chrome bug here which you could star if you're interested: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=564582

Seems like there isn't a really strong reason, but we would likely want some discussion before making any changes :)

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/CABcX4Ue%3DFTzPLoSF5hLt4vWST-4C3q_92nmCuA%3DwD0EHZo6NAQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Deco]

Reading on from the original thread the reason which was chosen really doesn't apply anymore, it seems like something which shouldn't be set by default, especially considering extension submissions go through manual review.

Seems like something which was overlooked from historical design decisions.

Cheers,

Deco

[Jean Lomdes]

Hi,

Because of the limit, developer has limited design choices to implement uninstall analytics. 

I would for example use this query string to add extension usage statistics.

+1 star https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=564582 

Please, anyone interested in seeing the limit increased  => ⭐️

Thank you,

Jean 

[Patrick Kettner]

That is a very silly bug.

I submitted a CL to bump the limit to 1023. Its going through the merge steps, assuming no issues should be fixed by later today.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/25431ec3-da9c-4486-a6e5-19a050c67015n%40chromium.org.

[Jean Lomdes]

Thank you. 

I am not sure about releasing processes, how long does it takes to go live on Chrome stable?

[Oliver Dunk]

It's currently in Chrome Canary: https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/commit/40b6ec3125e39f122bd21bc5bdf5aadc7848a96b. You can also see there that it's in Chrome 115 so it should make stable by around July 18th: https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/schedule

Though you may want to wait a few versions to make sure a large number of your users have updated.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB