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Does anybody know why the extension wants to 'access your tabs and browsing activity'. Is this permission required for it to work?

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It's necessary only because of one function call: chrome.windows.create().

We hope to remove the need for this permission in order to do basic tab management soon: http://crbug.com/137404.

We use the chrome.windows module to pop up our authentication window. During installation, this permission appears as "access your tabs and browsing activity."

http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/windows.html

Perhaps you could use window.open() to get around needing chrome.windows.create, which would allow you to remove this permission.

When we used window.open(), we ran into issues with Chrome's popup blocker. I think it's because we create the popup in an ajax callback. We'll take another look; there might be a workaround for us.

I just noticed that chrome.tabs.create doesn't require the 'tabs' permission, so that might be another option. Thanks for the help. We'll try to remove the permission in the next release. :)

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