Cool feature right?..
You get points for orthogonality, but how would you use it?
The reason for extension disabling in private is that extensions can compromise privacy by storing information that does not get deleted on exit.
Couldn’t be set for shifting responsibility to the user? a typical usage would be user wanting to use an extension of preferencee like a password manager, yes 3rd party but choice of user or an auto proxy, etc, but want to use extensions to complement the private windows and needed for a temp usage without too much setup, basically this is for custom config like yes you have tor but let the user have voice
At the risk of being a buzzkill this particular feature is not likely to be implemented. I think it’s a relatively niche request that doesn’t have enough use cases to justify the work it would take.
In your example of a password manager, the extension is installed in a browser and the user logs into their manager using credentials which are stored and used to access the service.
Access to this data in one direction (installed in browser → used in private) is possible already and makes sense, as we can pass the already existing data/credentials from the browser into a Private window and allow it to be used there (you’ll note that this must be explicitly dictated by the user, by going to brave://extensions, clicking Details then toggling the Allow in Private option “on” as shown below).
It does not make since to have this work the other way around for the exact reason @Meeker-Morgan suggested and as stated explicitly on the Allow in Private option shown above – extensions themselves are not confined to the rules of the window they’re used in. By installing a 3rd party extension, you also agree to whatever permissions they require and data they collect. The whole point of Private/Tor windows are to keep any data from leaving those windows once they’re closed.
At minimum, sticking with the example of a pw manager, if you were able to do this (install an extension that only runs in private windows), you would have to login to that extension every time, as the extension would have no stored data to pull credentials from. At that point, you’re better off simply logging into the website of the password manager in the browser directly, rather than using an extension. For example, if you only wanted to use LastPass in Private windows, instead of leveraging the extension, you would instead just launch a Private window and visit lastpass.com and login to access your account.
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Yeah I think a proxy extension would suits better as example, but for giving sense to the private window would be using extensions for privacy related situations, and respect use case in fact is what multi-containers solve, so as lack of it another alternative to setting profiles would be private window if it had that level of configuration, but yeah as this topic is related to private windows I believe I’ve seen few browsers which show certain customization than the typical chrome/firefox ones for PW, also that’s good to have cause it hasn’t a complete solution as looking at its name, respect the last but replacing it with another example I guess having another profile to pull credentials if needed or store specific data would be part of the making