Chrome 76, which to release on July 30, 2019, to make it easier to track extension activities. Google Chrome has never offered this facility before, it will be available in next version where the browser is slated to offer “View Activity log” option for each installed extension.
The Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool by Google available on the Chrome Web Store when installed offers a “Behavior” option for extensions to let the developers check the history and real-time behavior for each extension. As we reported before, the Chromium team wants to add a similar facility to chrome://extensions page for the users to analyze extensions behavior.
Currently, the feature is not live in any Chrome version but can be enabled even in the stable version by running Chrome with the below command line switch.
--enable-extension-activity-logging.
1. Once you launch Chrome with the above command line, click on Chrome menu > More tools > Extensions
2. Click on “Details” for any extension and click on “View Activity log” to notice History and Real-time tabs.
If you’ve installed the extension just now, it may take time for the activities to be listed. The extension activities recording is on by default, users can stop it by clicking “Stop recording” button in the real-time tab. Users will be allowed to export extension activities for careful examination, this will be saved to a JSON file.
Chromium developers fixed the feature associated bugs and said “the rest of CLs linked here should be in the next stable release (July 30). Any new features requests/bugs from the trust and safety team of external users will be filled separately”.
As we said before, the normal users may not understand the activities extension is performing, only advanced and security researchers may benefit from this. What do you say?
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