Doing per-user extension installation w/ per-profile disabledness override and configuration is an interesting idea. Seems simpler in some ways, and perhaps better than purely per-profile.
Since I already have this change almost lined up that implements per-profile, I'll send it out anyway so we can have something to poke at. It might even be good to just check this in as a checkpoint and then back it out to per-user. More thoughts inline... On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Erik Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Hmm. This isn't the conclusion I came to. First off, I think there was a > bit of confusion in terminology. People were throwing around per-user vs. > per-machine, and that's not what Aaron was talking about here. The main > issue right now is that Chrome still has a notion of multiple profiles. > Even though most users don't use multiple user profile directories, many > use incognito, which is a separate user profile. Since chrome is currently > installed per-user, this makes things a bit murky when you say > per-installation. In reality, I think all we're currently talking about is > per-user vs. per-profile. When we have machine-wide installs again, we can > talk about per-machine extensions. Conceivably, extensions could be installed at all these levels: - per-profile (inside the user data dir) - per-installation (next to chrome.exe) - per-user (in some known subdir of ~) - per-machine (in some known subdir of /) We don't need or want all of this though. We should pick a few levels that make sense. Currently the feedback I've heard voiced is: - We need an easy way for third-party software to install extensions per-machine or perhaps per-user - Sometimes it makes sense to install (or enable) an extension per-profile, sometimes not - Sometimes it makes sense to enable extensions in incognito mode, sometimes not > The second thing I saw people blurring was installation vs. configuration. > Just because you install the extension doesn't mean it has to be enabled > across all profiles or that it should have the same configuration data. In > fact, I would argue that by default, they wouldn't be enabled across > profiles and wouldn't share configuration data. Separating enabled/disabled-ness from installation is a really interesting idea. Usually extensions are installed per-profile in Firefox, but they can also be installed per-machine, though that is much less frequently used. In the case of per-machine extensions, you can override installation with a disabled flag. I can't recall if there is actually UI for this. What UI do you envision for disabling extensions per-profile? I guess this could go in a future management UI? What about for incognito mode? Perhaps in the management screen, we could have a checkmark for whether an extension is enabled in incognito mode? > Some of this discussion is also messed up because multiple profiles isn't > really a first class citizen in our UI, so it's unclear how much time we > should spend worrying about the use case. I agree this isn't a big deal. But if it's something that comes relatively cheaply (it turns out to), then it seems better not to break existing assumptions in Chromium and to go with the flow. > Here's my take about how things should work > - installation of extensions should be per-user (with the possibility of > per-machine when we have it) > - configuration (including whether or not it's enabled) should be > per-profile > - incognito should be a special case - users can manually disable extensions > for incognito, but we also pass a special flag into extensions when running > in incognito mode so that if they do run, they can behave appropriately > (ideally this is how we'd like to see plugins work as well) This makes sense to me. Let me send out the review and we can continue from there. - a --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
