New permissions: "Read the icons of the websites you visit"

[adelespinasse]

Chrome is now telling me it has disabled New Tab Redirect until I accept the new permissions, "Read the icons of the websites you visit".

Is that a side effect of the new permissions added to allow loading local files? That doesn't really make sense, but extension permissions often don't make sense.

It seems like a potential privacy issue if the extension can really see the icons of every web site visited (I assume that means favicons).

[gunthre]

I see that too, but it doesn't really make sense because reading icons has been part of the extension for years. The only new permission is host permissions for local files.

[aleksusklim]

This broke my setup on several machines in last few days.

I had very critical things bound to new tab redirection (and this is the only extension that achieved my goal), which I installed years ago and it worked with frozen chrome browser version.
Google Update service was disabled.

Today I was answering phone calls and re-enabling this extension in a rush.

I didn't even realize that chrome extension can update itself like that, without explicit user action!
I just googled this solution: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27657617/how-to-disable-google-chrome-extension-autoupdate
For windows, it proposes to run this .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update]
"AutoUpdateCheckPeriodMinutes"=dword:00000000
"UpdateDefault"=dword:00000000

Before enrolling this to all machines, I have to somehow confirm that it will work and indeed prevents updating of everything. I find it strange that Chrome does not allow to simply disable auto-update on per-extension basis as Firefox does right away.

[jimschubert]

It's an unfortunate side effect of moving to Chrome's Manifest v3. Icons have always been necessary for the default new tab page, which is the core functionality of this extension.