Talk:Wikimedia Apps/Reading list browser extension

This is all well and good for people who access Wikipedia with their telephones, but why is this service only available to them? A lot of people use their computers to access Wikipedia. Would it be possible for this kind of program to be made available for Windows/Mac/Linux OSs, as well as Android and IOS compatibility?

It’s planned for logged-in users in phab:T322092.

Linked from Wikimedia_Apps/Reading_list_browser_extension and addons.mozilla.org

AMO still broken, after four and a half months. Nobody cares?

Is there a reason you haven't released a tool to provide FULL access to Reading lists on the phone to the desktop?

Maybe I'm the only one who wants to see and use the lists created on my phone on my desktop.

Have I missed how to accomplish this?

There isn't an official way to access your reading list on the web, yet. There is a task to track the request (which also mentions a user script), and I've let the teams know of your interest. :)

The plugin doesn't need complete access to the browsing history. The browsers state that the plugin requires access to browsing history as a consequence of it requiring access to the URL of the current tab.

The plug-in seems to be requiring the permission to access the browsing history of the user. It's not immediately obvious why that is required for the plug-in. Why does the plug-in need access to the browsing history?

Chrome displays this permission description as a result of the extension's requiring the "tabs" permission. You can see the details of that API here:

https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tabs

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs

The tabs permission is required specifically to manage active/inactive state on Firefox (the extension is written so that the identical code can run in both browsers despite some API differences).

FYI, you can inspect the full list of permissions requested in the extension here, in the extension's manifest:

https://github.com/wikimedia/webextension-readinglists/blob/master/extension/manifest.json#L7-L18

Thanks. That was informative. The browsers could have given that permission string a little more thought. On reading that permission I thought the plugin had complete access to my browsing history (which seemed unnecessary for this plugin).

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T197822

While the extension is mainly for allowing users to bookmark wikipedia sites, the extension request permission to access data of non-Wikipedia sites such as wikivoyage, wikibooks etc. Why does it need permission to access non-Wikipedia sites' data?

Further, the extension seems to too lousy in that it even allows me to add Commons user pages to the Wikipedia reading list. Not only that it even allows to add Special:Preferences and every single page which makes no sense to add to a Wikipedia reading list.

Hi Kaartic!

To answer your question: the extension (and the Reading List Service) were actually designed to support bookmarking content from any of our projects. So this is indeed a feature, not a bug :)

As far as not blocking the bookmarking of special pages: we did not want to be prescriptive to users and tell them which content cannot be bookmarked. This is of course something that can be refined if there are good reasons. If you think we should disallow bookmarking of certain namespaces or other pages, please file a ticket and we will review:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2726/

Thanks for the feedback!