What are some good ways to notify users in case of emergencies?

[Jackie Han]

Chrome 145 has a bug that affects all extensions that use the tabGroup API. This bug is clearly visible to users.

Although the bug has been quickly fixed, it won't be pushed to users until the next Chrome version, Chrome 146. Users will be unable to use the extension properly for a month. What's a good way to let users know about this?

What can I do?

• update CWS listing description: This needs to be reviewed
• release a new version, popup a page to tell users: This needs to be reviewed
• write a review myself to tell users: This don't need to be reviewed

Can CWS do something about this? For example

• Could CWS provide developers with a customizable bulletin board for announcing urgent or important matters?
• Could Chrome or CWS notify users, for a period of time, via some UI that a certain extension might not be working properly due to a Chrome bug?

Jackie Han

[Jackie Han]

Many social networking sites allow authors to pin one or more comments, which can act as notifications. For example, on YouTube, an author can pin a comment (such as a comment they wrote) to get users' attention. Similarly, if CWS also provides this feature, then developers can let users see announcements.

[al]

I feel like there was a WECG issue discussing something similar, where the NTP could host notifications from extensions. (I don't mean via the notifications API)

From memory the vendor sentiment wasn neutral to negative, though could be wrong. 

One method could be for the ext to check some sever endpoint for alerts, then display them (on any page I guess).

Obviously though that doesn't work for every extension.

On the vendor side, perhaps if the extensions page had another side menu item, under "Keyboard Shortcuts" that hosted what you're talking about. 

It could show a very neutral colour indicator (akin to mobile app badges) if there's some alert.

In my opinion, that will be misused immediately, not only by bad actors, but probably by commercial publishers.

So maybe if it was ASCII text only (not rich) and restricted, e.g. 1 item at any time, no way to know if dismissed by user. 

I think your problem should be addressed, imo.

[Roberto Oneto]

You could publish a new version, asking the user for permission to receive notifications. Explain to the user that this permission will be used to keep them informed and that its use will not be abused.
Set a long-term recurring alarm (for example, every 2 hours), and when this alarm goes off, read a news JSON saved on your backend server.
This JSON will contain information such as a text, a validity period, the browser version the news refers to, and a simple numeric ID.
The code behind the alarm will only consider objects in the JSON with an ID greater than the ID stored in a storage.local variable.
Therefore, when you need to notify your users, simply add a new object to the JSON array with an incremented ID.
Without having to use Firebase and push notifications, you will have a trivial but still reliable alerting system.
I use this system in my extensions and overall I find it less "annoying" than popup a new tab with the news with each new version.

The json could have this form:

[{
        "id": 1,
        "title": "Pay attention please",
        "msg": "A new bug was found...",
        "start": "2026-02-21T13:15:01",
        "stop": "2026-02-26T23:59:59",
        "vmin": "144",
        "vmax": "146"
    }
]

[Simeon Vincent]

One method could be for the ext to check some sever endpoint for alerts, then display them (on any page I guess).

I generally advise developers stand up a JSON endpoint they can occasionally poll to show critical news updates in an extension. I'd caution against passively injecting news into every page because that may be a significant increase in your extension's data access. Instead, consider using a combination of badging the extension's action button in the toolbar, showing the warning when the user invokes the extension, passively showing it at the top of the extension's options page, and using the Notifications API (Chrome, MDN). 

Simeon - @dotproto

incremental.software

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