Extension ids

[snoack]

Continuing the discussion from the last teleconf. Currently, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have persistent IDs, while Firefox is randomly generating an ID when the extension is loading. From the last meeting notes it seems that the majority of this group prefers unique persistent global IDs.

I'm not sure how important it is to have the ID persistent across browsers (?), however it seems to make sense to have a persistent ID, for native and cross-extension messaging, in the same browser, at least.

On the other hand, if an extension has web accessible resources this makes the extension easily detectable for websites, if the browserext:// URL is predictable due to a static extension ID. One solution could be to use URLs like browserext://<extension_id>.<random_token>/<path> where random_tokenis generated when the extension is loaded.

[frivoal]

As per the 2017-02-02 teleconf, action on @mikepie1 and @scottlow to check internally with Microsoft people and comment on this topic.

[roke-julian-lockhart]

http://github.com/browserext/browserext/issues/14#issue-181368863

Surely the extension would be possible to detect regardless of whether of its URL were containing one random token, because that token is prepended by the static identifier of the extension, which I am quite confident is possible to extract from the URL without any of the appended string.