We will shortly be releasing a beta version of version 3.9 and the stable version will follow approximately one week later. There will be no noticeable change in this version.
Behind the scenes, we have been forced to make an internal adjustment, explained in more detail below, and we have therefore increased the minimum supported Firefox version to 78 (released June 2020). If you use a version of Firefox older than 78, you won’t get the update to v3.9, nor any future Kee browser extension updates so please ensure you upgrade to a secure and supported web browser soon.
The only change is the removal of a required permission that would allow the extension to access (read) content from your system clipboard. Before Kee 3.9, we have requested this permission alongside the related permission to change (write) because bugs in earlier versions of web browsers required us to do so.
We have continued to require this permission after the relevant bugs were fixed for two reasons:
- A long-standing feature idea to clear the clipboard after a certain length of time will require it.
- Requesting a new permission when the extension is updated disables the extension and produces a scary warning message which we cannot control.
Google have now asked us to remove this permission from the extension since it is currently unused. We could therefore either do so, or implement the clipboard clearing feature mentioned above. I decided that we should remove the permission for the following reasons:
- The clipboardRead permission can now be made optional (you are asked to enable it only when enabling the relevant extension feature - in this case the hypothetical clipboard clearing feature). This allows us to avoid the confusing and scary warnings that web browsers would display if we need to re-enable the permission again in future. However, it is a relatively recent possibility - Safari since September 2020, Firefox since June 2020 (v77) and Edge since January 2020 - so we’re not sure if it will work correctly for all extension users today.
- Given the huge range of bugs relating to clipboard access that have existed in all browsers for so many years, I’m not willing to assume that all is going to work as documented today.
- Google have required that the change be made very quickly - too quickly for any significant development work to take place and I’m not prepared to sacrifice the security or stability of the extension to meet their demand. Since the new feature would require planning, implementation, testing and time from our generous team of language translators, and may not even work after that effort, we can’t tackle this task at the moment.
If, for a future version of Kee, anyone wants to contribute the code to enable optional clearing of clipboard data after a configurable number of seconds, please feel free to discuss your plan, provided that you are willing to confirm whether or not the feature will work in the currently supported range of web browsers (most recent, the one before that, and the latest “extended support” version the browser developer offers).
