I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 2.0 on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons page. This release updates the extension to Manifest Version 3 which will be required by Chrome soon. The major version bump reflects the amount of work it has taken to achieve this port.
Plasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs and visited websites in KRunner, monitor download progress in the notification center, and control music and video playback anytime from within Plasma, or even from your phone using KDE Connect!
Despite the version number, there aren’t many user-facing changes. This release comes with the usual translation updates, however. Since this release doesn’t bring any advantage to Firefox users over the previous 1.9.1, it will not be provided on the Mozilla add-ons store.
We have taken the opportunity of reworking the extension manifest to make the “history” permission mandatory. When the browser history KRunner module was originally added, the permission was optional as we feared it might scare users away when presented with a scary permission warning when updating the extension.
(also see the Changelog Page on our Community Wiki)
Any progress on making it compatible to flatpak browsers?
There are a bunch of inmutable distros popping up and most of those use flatpak as the default app store.
What is there to make compatible? It’s the distros making themselves incompatible with everyone else, not the other way round. They broke it, so they have to fix it. All this extension needs is for the browser to run the host and open a socket to it, how hard can it be…
I understand the sentiment but the trend is for better security and more isolation between application.
Could you publish what is the API between the browser extension and and the host system so we can adapt the needed permissions for flatpak and possibly other systems. I saw a few threads where people have had issues with apparmor settings.
See https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/concepts/native-messaging and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging
tl;dr p-b-i installs a manifest file into some browser config folder that lets the extension launch and talk to the `/usr/bin/plasma-browser-integration-host`