Hi! We understand your concern, and it's a very valid one. Unfortunately we need these permissions for Substital to work properly. But as we move to Manifest V3, we would like to find ways to not need these permissions anymore. Moreover, as I said in other replies, a lot of popular browser extensions are also using the same permission as Substital:

AdBlocker Ultimate: Access your data for all websites
Grammarly: Access your data for all websites
LastPass Password Manager: Access your data for all websites
uBlock Origin: Access your data for all websites

To be noted: those extensions even require a lot more permissions than Substital for example. Some extensions can be complex and unfortunately those permissions are required.

To clarify, we inject Substital (elements in the page to detect the videos, to choose and load subtitles, to modify subtitles settings etc.) only when the user interacts with the Substital extension icon on the top right of the browser, unlike other extensions where scripts are automatically injected in the pages without any user interaction, or without the user even knowing. This is what we meant by "Substital is passive by default...".

As for the notes about the monitoring by Mozilla; for each new update, it is required for us to provide and upload the entire source code. The Mozilla team has always access to the entire source code of the extension. The source must be clear, readable, and nothing must be minified or hidden. And they DO monitor it, as we sometimes have to fix some issues they find.

There's absolutely no way to hide anything in the extension from the Mozilla team. The way the process works is that they build the extension on their side using the entire source code we provided to them, and they compare it with the packaged extension we submitted to the store. If it differs even by a tiny bit, they would reach out to us.

I hope I answered your interrogation. And happy to answer any question you may have :)

Hey, sorry that it doesn't work. Could you please tell us what specifically didn't work so we could have a look? Thank you for your feedback.

Hey! No creepy stuff under the hood :) Substital for Firefox was manually reviewed multiple times by persons from the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons team. It's a pre-requisite to be published here in the store. If there would be creepy stuff under the hood, it would not be published.

About the permissions, we're happy to clear that out for you. The other extension you mentioned is different in many ways. It does not work the same way as Substital and does not have the features that Substital provides. (as you said, it's not that polished). No, Substital cannot work with only the activeTab permission. The reasons is that we inject elements in the page that need broader permissions to be able to work, like for example the area where users can search for subtitles.

To be noted, other popular extensions such as AdBlock or Grammarly also use broader permissions such as "Access your data for all websites".

Hope that helps! :) We plan to add soon a better detailed description why these permissions are needed. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks! :) I get what you mean! We will take your suggestion into account.

Hey sure! :) We need to grant Substital access to all the websites since we are injecting scripts that are needed for the basic functionalities of the extension. It is needed for example for the settings menu for the subtitles in the video controls, and for the area that pops up inside the video and that allows users to search for their subtitles.