Automatic permission addition is totally unacceptable, agreed. But I do think that Firefox should actually ask, at least once. A vague exclamation point on the edge of the screen isn't really a sufficient way of handling that for extensions a user has chosen to add.

> then ask for more permissions.

I agree with you. As another reply to you states, however, Firefox doesn't currently let me ask. You have to kind of go hunting for it.

> And if you're not adding a new feature, then why do you need more permissions?

Firefox does not let me explain why the permissions are needed. It would be nice if we could have a little blurb where we can state our case next to each permission.

Our current approach is to explain likely upcoming permissions requests in advance and ask our users to stay vigilant for the appearance of the tiny yellow exclamation mark, but that's not very helpful to the third of users stuck on old verions before we learnt that trick.

> And don't be surprised when people say NO.

I think very few of these users have said no on purpose. We ask for (and use) almost everything [1], so any marginal new permissions are unlikely to give us much more power. The current permission model actually makes it tempting to just literally ask for everything because we might want it for a new feature in the future.

The optional permissions are not fine-grained enough to be useful (you can accept all optional permissions, or none) and not available for enough permissions, otherwise we would use them.

Also, the first versions of our software were really slow and bad. I really doubt many people are staying there on purpose. (If there are any Tridactyl users in this thread using an old version on purpose, I'd like to hear from you :) ).

[1] https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/e20a224fb8d8bbb2b7...