Chrome extension page action appearing outside of address bar

Question

I wrote a Chrome Extension page action, with the following implementation:

In manifest.json:

  "permissions" : [     "declarativeContent"   ], 

In background.js:

chrome.runtime.onInstalled.addListener(function() {   // Replace all rules ...   chrome.declarativeContent.onPageChanged.removeRules(undefined, function() {     // With a new rule ...     chrome.declarativeContent.onPageChanged.addRules([       {         conditions: [           new chrome.declarativeContent.PageStateMatcher({             pageUrl: { urlMatches: 'www\.somewebsite\.com/(translate|revise)/' },           })         ],         // And shows the extension's page action.         actions: [ new chrome.declarativeContent.ShowPageAction() ]       }     ]);   }); }); 

I noticed that in most Chrome browsers, the page action icon appears correctly inside the address and only appears when the matching page is met:

However, in some browsers recently page actions started appearing as enabled/disabled browser actions, i.e. outside the address bar, which is a lot clumsier because the whole idea around page actions icons is that they appear if and only if the page is relevant to them. There is no point showing a disabled page action for most of the time. Actually, it happened to browsers where it used to work well days ago, like if a Chrome update had some side effects.

I presume this is related to some Chrome setting that now shows all extensions there, but is there any way I can force the page action to appear consistently in the address bar and only appear when it can be really useful?

Answer 1

It appears like this is the result of a new update to Chrome, with the developers probably reasoning that most users would not know that they had extensions installed otherwise.

Link to announcement: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/chromium-extensions/upcoming/chromium-extensions/7As9MKhav5E/dNiZDoSCCQAJ

It doesn't look like extension developers can do anything about this, but I really hope Google reverts this change.