Chrome's security policy is surprisingly poor and is the reason why I stay away from most extensions. "Read data from all websites" is like root on the phone. It should be allowed only via deliberate, explicit user action. While this will be an interesting UX challenge, defaulting to domain-specific permissions is the sane thing to do in this age. Case in point, I don't care about a readability or bookmarking plugin…
More or less why I run a fairly minimal set of extensions. I was looking for a bulk downlowned about a week ago, and the only ones I found requested "Read data from all websites", which is a lot of trust to put in something I have limited ability to test/know if it is malicious. Side note: Chrome appears to have moved Extensions out of Settings since I last looked, and the "search settings" bar doesn't bring it up ei…
AIUI that's a consequence of the Chrome extension security model. How could a bulk-downloader extension download files from arbitrary web sites without "Read[ing] data from all websites"?
Compare that to Firefox's model (at least, the old XUL model), where every extension essentially runs as the Firefox equivalent of "root".
But by making nearly every extension sound evil, even the ones that aren't, users get used to accepting every permission request, or not installing any extensions at all.
IMO the danger is worse with Chrome. At least with Firefox, you know that every extension can potentially be malicious. With Chrome, what happens is, you install an extension that has nice-sounding permissions. Then 3 months later, it gets sold to an ad/malware company, they push out a new version that reports every URL you visit to their server, and you see a popup saying that some extension needs more permissions. Maybe you notice it, maybe you think nothing of it--or maybe the browser window steals focus while you're typing and the OK button gets pressed without your even realizing it.