Proposal: about: matching

[erosman]

Proposal: about: matching

Background

Match patterns does not match about: URLs.
While some APIs such as Content scripts or scripting support about: matching via additional options (match_about_blank, match_origin_as_fallback), there are others that don't have such options.

menus/contextMenus is a commonly used example where documentUrlPatterns is insufficient for this purpose.

I recently needed to limit the context-menu to ['http://*/*', 'https://*/*','about:newtab', 'about:blank']. The only option is to omit documentUrlPatterns which results in the contextMenu appearing in many unwanted pages such as file://, toolbar popups, and extension pages.

Proposal

Provide a method to match about:newtab, about:blank, etc

Suggestions

A few possibilities:

1. Include the ability to match about:newtab, about:blank and in Match patterns (preferable)
2. Add additional matching options (e.g. similar to scripting) to APIs that don't have it

[xeenon]

menus/contextMenus is a commonly used example where documentUrlPatterns is insufficient for this purpose

It's not just insufficient, it's completely unsupported outside Firefox. There are at least 3 tickets like https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41305289 documenting this but they're all expired/closed.

Safari supports documentUrlPatterns.

[fregante]

Safari supports documentUrlPatterns.

Indeed it appears to have been resolved since I first noticed this in 2021 (Safari 14.0.1) fregante/webext-permission-toggle#14

So it's just a Chrome issue

[fregante]

I recently needed to limit the context-menu to ['http://*/*', 'https://*/*','about:newtab', 'about:blank'].

I think that allowing explicit 'about:blank' strings would be safer than a blanket about:* pattern:

• no extension should probably have access to about:debugging or about:flags
• it's easier to statically detect what an extension intends to alter/access

So the array of strings as you wrote it sounds good to me. Dropping match_about_blank would also be a good followup for MV4

[erosman]

I think that allowing explicit 'about:blank' strings would be safer than a blanket about:* pattern:

That is also what I meant (as per Proposal). I will update the topic to make it clearer.