1440668 - activeTab permission does not work inside menus.onShown callback

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[marczellm]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20171024165158

Steps to reproduce:

Created a webextension containing the following code in a background script:


browser.menus.onShown.addListener(async (info, tab) => {
    	const selection = await browser.tabs.executeScript({
	    code: ''document.getSelection();"
	});
	console.log(selection);
    }
});

The extension does request the "activeTab" permission in manifest.json.



Actual results:

The debugger indicates that at the executeScript() call, an exception was thrown with the message "Error: Missing host permission for the tab"

I believe that the onShown callback falls under "the user interacting with the extension" and therefore the activeTab permission should allow this case.


Expected results:

The current selection is logged to the console.

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

I'm skeptical about this, this event can be triggered just by hovering over an extension's context menu entry which I would not describe as a deliberate interaction with the extension.

Comment 2

[marczellm]

For context, the extension which I'm porting is 
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gtranslate/

which translates the selected text when you open its context menu submenu, and displays the translation in a menu item.

On the other hand, after I opened this bug, selectionText was added to the info object received by the event handler, so for this use case the permission is no longer needed.