The "notifications" extension permission is currently independent of the "notifications" permission of the permission manager. Consequently, it is not possible to meaningfully add functionality to the buttons/menu items that appear when a notification is triggered with the extension principal (this happened in bug 1577316).

Moreover, it is not possible to use the Notification API from an extension without an additional call to Notification.requestPermission.

By integrating the notifications permission in the permission manager, it would be possible to address these two issues, and also give users more control over which extension notifications they want to see.

This would also improve extension compatibility with Chrome, where the Notification API from the web is unlocked when the "notifications" extension permission is present. As part of manifest v3, they are considering the removal of the chrome.notifications API, in favor of the web API. In order for this to be possible, the "notifications" extension permission should unlock the Notification API on the web, via the internal "desktop-notification" permission.

These patches should land after the fix for bug 1589754, because otherwise the new unit tests will fail.

It would be nice if once we have this we can change the Android notification code to take up the URL too. See Bug 1649494

Rob is planning to rebase the patches, but it is not an high priority at the moment.

In the meantime I'm changing the priority to match the one assigned to the blocked bugs.