The social media landscape from Twitter and Mastodon to Instagram and TikTok has, for better or worse, centralized on sharing text highlights and quotes as images rather than as plain text.

I like to share my highlights from across the web, which is why I publish topic-specific RSS feeds for people to subscribe to.

However, one of the features that I’ve been missing for a while now on Notado is exporting screenshots for social sharing. This weekend I finally set aside some time to make this feature a reality.

For the past three years I have maintained a browser extension that I publish to both the Firefox and Chrome web stores.

I recently received an automated email from the Chrome web store overlords who had decided I was violating the “Use of permissions” policy by requesting the cookies permission “without using it”.

Here is a snippet from the manifest.json for my extension:

{
  "permissions": [
    "activeTab",
    "contextMenus",
    "notifications",
    "cookies",
    "https://<SPECIFIC_WEBSITE_RUN_BY_ME>/"
  ]
}

I request the cookies permission for https://<SPECIFIC_WEBSITE_RUN_BY_ME>/ so that I can transparently use the cookie set by that website when the user logs in to send authenticated HTTP requests from the extension. Nothing crazy: