We are sorry to hear you are disappointed with Mendeley Web Importer. We continue to make efforts to improve it daily and hope that your satisfaction will increase as we work to improve its usability, stability and performance.

Hi there! As product manager for this extension, I can categorically assure you that we have no intention at all in displaying advertisements. It would wreck the user experience and call forth exactly the kind of indignation I sense from your comment here :)

The notification permission is used for communicating status messages, such as displaying errors when Mendeley Web Importer cannot import a document. We may potentially use it also in future to indicate that uploads have finished.

I hope you have been enjoying using Mendeley Web Importer and will continue to benefit from it.

Good question – but we have good reasons:

1. Mendeley Web Importer needs to read the content of the web page in order to detect document identifiers within it. The extension then looks up metadata for the identifier from Mendeley Catalog.

2. Mendeley Web Importer automatically follows link redirects in order to be able to locate a full text PDF for the references it detects. Since the PDF may not be hosted on the web page you are looking at, the extension requires permissions to follow the redirects to be able to look at other websites.

I hope this clarifies why the extension asks for the permissions it does. If you have any follow-up questions, please use the "Send feedback" link in the extension and we'll be happy to discuss further.