Intent to soft-ship: new unified extensions UI

[William Durand]

Hi everyone,

As part of our Manifest Version 3 work, we are introducing a new button in the toolbar to manage extensions. This permanent button will start to appear in Nightly builds (only) soon. The bug to enable the feature in Nightly is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1793626, and users will be able to disable the feature with the `extensions.unifiedExtensions.enabled` pref.

One of the main goals of MV3 in Firefox is to allow users to review and control which extensions have access to a particular page. To enable this, MV3 treats the host permissions listed in the extension manifest as optional and opt-in. The new unified extensions button provides a UX interface that allows users to easily review, grant, and revoke extensions' access to specific sites in the context of the task they are trying to accomplish.

For additional details and behind-the-scenes product decisions, see this document (MoCo + NDA only). If you have questions or feedback, please reach out to us on Matrix or Slack (#addons).

We plan to enable this new button/UI for everyone when we release MV3.

William (on behalf of the Add-ons team)

[William Durand]

Hi all,

Thanks for the feedback on the new Unified Extensions UI. We continued to work on this new UI, adding new features and addressing some of the initial concerns. Extensions widgets (also known as browser actions) can now be placed into the unified extensions panel and common browser action features (popups, custom icons, badges, etc.) are now available from within the new panel!

In addition, browser actions will overflow into this new extension panel when needed. Isn’t that what the overflow menu is about? We want to provide a consistent central UI for access to and managing extensions, so it was natural to separate browser actions from normal overflow. Extensions currently placed in the overflow menu will be migrated to the new panel soon [1]. In the end, a browser action will either be listed in the unified extensions panel (the default, see also [2] and [3]) or pinned to one of the toolbars using the context menu.

In no particular order, we’d like to thank dao, mconley, Itiel, morgan, Gijs and ayeddi for their help! Thank you to everyone who provided early feedback too, please continue to do so :)

William (on behalf of the Add-ons team)

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1798896

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1799947

[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1799846