Chrome is testing a prompt before extensions reach every site
Google is testing an install-time choice that would stop new Chrome extensions from reaching every website by default.
Chrome may soon ask before an extension gets access to everything. Google is testing a change to the install flow that replaces automatic all-site access with a choice the user has to make on the spot.
What is changing
At the moment, adding an extension from the Chrome Web Store grants it access to all websites, and anyone who wants to narrow that has to go back and edit the extension's settings afterwards. In the tested version, Chrome raises a prompt during installation offering two options, 'When you click the extension' and 'Always on all sites', with the first one already selected.
Why the default carries the weight
Defaults do most of the work in browser security, and this one leans towards the cautious setting. An ad blocker, password manager or grammar checker left on 'when you click' will look broken until the user clicks its toolbar icon, so the change is likely to generate support noise before it generates gratitude. The feature was spotted by the long-running Chrome watcher Leopeva64, whose demonstration shows the click-to-run option selected out of the box. It appears to apply to extensions added from now on rather than to those already installed.
The argument it lands in
The prompt arrives in the middle of a long fight over how much power extensions should hold. Google's move from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3, which narrowed how extensions can inspect and modify page content, was contested by developers and privacy campaigners, and the company has spent the years since arguing that its platform is more private and more secure than the one it replaced. Handing site access back to the user at the moment of installation is a much smaller change than that, but it is the same idea in a cheaper form: make the permissive outcome something a person deliberately chooses.
Our opinion
The tell here is not the prompt but the assumption underneath it. Chrome's designers are betting that most people will accept the tighter setting at install time and never go back, which is a bet placed with other people's extensions. That is entirely defensible for a screenshot tool and quietly hostile to an ad blocker, and both arrive through the same dialog. Google has spent years telling regulators and users that it wants extensions to be a matter of informed consent; a consent screen that appears once, before the user has any experience of the extension, is thinner than it sounds. If the company means it, the same two options belong in the extension's toolbar menu, where the decision can be revisited after it has proved to matter.