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I have a Chrome extension that watches for an extra query parameter in a url on certain sites. I'm adding functionality to a new site and the issue I'm running into is that the site redirects to a different url and strips out my custom query before my content script can load.

It looks like I can get around this by using the webNavigation API in my background script and adding a listener for chrome.webNavigation.onCommitted. The problem is that by adding webNavigation permissions into my manifest, I'm now asking for permission to "Read your browsing history." I've put a lot of time into trying to limit the scope of my extension permissions to certain sites and I really don't want to ask the user for carte blanche permission like this.

I've found two other threads on SO about this issue, but in one, the user found a workaround that I don't think will work in my case (although if someone has a suggested workaround, I'm all ears), and the other suggests that by adding a filter to the listener declaration, it will limit the permissions request. That answer was not accepted as correct and, indeed, I'm not seeing any permissions difference whether or not I have a filter.

Is it simply not possible to achieve what I'd like to do and also limit the scope of the permissions warning? Or am I missing something? Thanks.

My webNavigation listener declaration:

chrome.webNavigation.onCommitted.addListener(function(e) 
 //Can dig out my query parameter from e
 console.log(e);
,
 url: [hostContains: "[NAME OF HOST]"]
);

I was able to figure out a workaround for my situation. I don't think this will work for everyone, but using the webRequest API allowed me to intercept the page load request before the redirect and store my query string for later. The webRequest API also didn't ask for any permissions beyond what I was already asking for via a content-script>matches array in my manifest.json file, which causes Chrome to ask for permission to "Read and change your data on a number of websites" and then lists those websites.

chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(
 function(details) 

 //details.url contains my query string 
 var url = details.url;
 return;
 , 
 urls: ['*://*.mysite.com/*'],
 types: ['main_frame'] //Filters out all the js,css,ajax,etc requests
 
);