Why I get a notification: “Privacy Sandbox Analysis Tool started debugging this browser”

[milindmore22]

When I enabled the extension and visited a page, I saw a popup saying “Privacy Sandbox Analysis Tool started debugging this browser” what is that popup for?

[milindmore22]

The notification being displayed is what is called an Info Bar, which are informational messages associated with any given Tab. They are displayed when something happens in the Tab that the user should be aware of, and they are designed to be non-modal so as not to interrupt the workflow.

The purpose of PSAT is to help developers analyze and understand the usage of third-party cookies during browsing sessions. To achieve this, PSAT uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to debug and collect information about sites being loaded during a browsing session. And since CDP is a debugging capability, Chrome displays a message letting the user know that CDP is active and the browser session is being debugged.

There are two approaches that you can follow with PSAT as of v0.4.

Enable PSAT during debugging sessions, and disable it after completing them
Keep PSAT enabled all the time, and just ignore the notification.

Soon in an upcoming version, PSAT will allow the enabling and disabling of its debugging capabilities directly from the tool itself, so you can keep the extension enabled but switch to debugging only when needed.

You can learn more about the PSAT extension from our GitHub Wiki pages.