Proposal: Exclude Matching

[erosman]

Proposal: Exclude Matching

Background

While some APIs such as Content scripts or scripting support excludeMatches, there are others that don't have such option.

menus/contextMenus is a commonly used example where documentUrlPatterns is insufficient for this purpose.
Other examples include: webRequest.RequestFilter urls.

Another example would be disabling context menus on (chrome/moz)-extension://.

Proposal

Provide a method to exclude match in APIs the don't have them

Suggestions

A few possibilities:

1. Consider negative matching in Match patterns
   As once suggested in Exclude in Match patterns, a negative match pattern that would simply translate to excludeMatches
   e.g. ["*://*.example.org/*", "!*://*.example.org/support/*"]
2. Add additional matching property (e.g. similar to scripting) to APIs that don't have it

[rdcronin]

We discussed this at the WECG meet-up.

All browsers are supportive of this general functionality (adding in the ability to exclude matches in more places). We had some discussion around possible implementations, as called out in the "Suggestions", between whether to allow a "!" syntax in the set of match patterns vs having a separate key. This needs more discussion. (We like that this meant there would only be one key, but it raised some questions around implicit ordering, priorities, interaction with keys that had exclude matches, etc.)

It was also highlighted that there are some APIs where we likely wouldn't support this, such as contentSettings. This is because the contentSettings API hooks into the browser's content settings system, which wouldn't support this (and changing that would require significant changes and a significantly more complex UI for content settings in the browser's settings page). However, as a general case, we're supportive.

Flipping Chrome's bit; I'll let other folks indicate support from other browsers. This isn't something we'll likely get to in the near future, but is something that makes sense for the platform if someone else wanted to drive it.