It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on `*.google.com` access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage

Albano Hummel

@simon I can confirm this also works on @Vivaldi.

Vivaldi staff, is this the best place to report this to hopefully be fixed? Or is there a better place to do so?

Steffo

@simon Seems like this is happening on @Vivaldi as well; can you folks have a look at it?

Alex Russell

@simon Default extensions are a place where Google has done some real damage to the web, and those of us working on platform have been grumpy for more than a decade that this and the Docs Offline nonsense continues to persist.

In both cases, it fell to other teams (not the Hangouts or Docs peeps) to build replacement APIs; e.g.:

Chrome Platform Status

(chromestatus.com)

Thomas Pike

@alh @simon @Vivaldi It is already possible to turn this off in Vivaldi. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security and uncheck "Meet (was Hangouts)" under Google Extensions. You will need to restart the browser for the change to take effect.

Tim Chambers

@simon That is like an add for #Firefox or @Vivaldi ....

BeAware :fediverse:

@simon Can't help but wonder if UnGoogled Chromium has this taken care of... I'd like to hope so, but I can't assume.

rRonald rRedball

@simon "nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome" ?!

What manner of code is this

rRonald rRedball

@simon I tried to share the above link on my Facebook page and Facebook immediately flagged it as spam and removed it.

Simon Willison

@rredball that's the Chrome extension ID, I found that here: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/114ce7cc6f47e4d06bb8a5168e3ed2efd38fc0d6/chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/manifest_v3.json#L6

Tymscar :linux:

@simon slightly off-topic, but is ChatGPT using imgur to host their pictures? This is what I see when I open your shared conversation

Simon Willison

@Tymscar something has gone very wrong there - shouldn't be any images in that post at all, it looks like this for me

Simon Willison

@rredball that's really weird! I tried sharing that just now on my own account and it didn't block it, maybe it didn't like that it was a reply with a URL but no text?

Vivaldi

@steffo
We've had a setting for this in Vivaldi for a while, which you can disable from Settings > Privacy > Google Extensions. Disable "Meet (was Hangouts)" and restart the browser.
Please note, that it will break some Google services.

waldi

@simon Hmm, my Chromium 126 does not even allow me to access the `chrome.runtime` API from any page. It is also mentioned that this API is for extensions and content scripts, aka not for plain pages.

Simon Willison

@waldi not even on a www.google.com page? I can't access chrome.runtime on other sites but it works for me on Google pages