Does Canvas Detect Chrome Extensions?

This question gets asked constantly and answered badly. The honest answer has two halves, because Canvas and the proctoring software your school may have bolted onto it are completely different pieces of software with completely different powers.

The short version

Canvas by itself cannot see your extensions. Canvas is a website. Websites run in a sandbox and are not handed a list of what you have installed. There is no Canvas feature, setting or report that shows an instructor your browser extensions.

Proctoring software usually can. Tools such as HonorLock, Proctorio and Respondus LockDown Browser are not websites. They are browser extensions or standalone applications with far broader permissions, and several of them do enumerate installed extensions and flag ones they consider suspicious.

What Canvas does record

Canvas logs plenty, just not that. During a quiz it can record when the attempt started, when each answer was selected or changed, and in Classic Quizzes whether the page lost focus. Those are the entries that read as "stopped viewing the quiz page" and "resumed" in an instructor's quiz log. New Quizzes keeps a comparable timeline plus your IP address.

So the real question is rarely whether Canvas can see your extensions. It is almost always whether the attempt log looks ordinary. Those are different problems with different answers.

How proctoring tools differ from each other

Browser-extension proctors

HonorLock and Proctorio install as Chrome extensions. Because they run with extension-level permissions they can see your other extensions, monitor tabs, access your webcam and microphone, and in some configurations record your screen. If one of these is active, assume it knows what is installed.

Lockdown browsers

Respondus LockDown Browser replaces your browser entirely for the exam. Your usual Chrome profile, and everything installed in it, is simply not running while you are inside it.

No proctoring at all

The most common case by far. Plenty of Canvas quizzes have no proctoring layer whatsoever, just Canvas and its own activity log.

How to tell which applies to you

Check the assignment page before the quiz opens. Proctored exams almost always announce themselves with a system check, a webcam permission prompt, an install step, or explicit instructions in the description. If your instructor has not mentioned proctoring and the quiz opens straight into questions with no setup, there is very likely no proctoring extension involved.

If you are unsure, ask. "Is this exam proctored, and if so with what?" is an ordinary question, and the answer determines everything else.

The part people get wrong

A lot of advice online says "Canvas can detect extensions" and stops there. That conflates the LMS with proctoring software and sends students worrying about the wrong thing. Canvas's visibility ends at its own browser tab. A proctoring extension's visibility does not.

The opposite error is just as common: assuming that because Canvas cannot see extensions, nothing is recorded at all. Canvas records the shape of your attempt in detail, and that log exists whether or not any proctoring tool is installed.

Why a website cannot see your extensions

It is worth understanding the actual mechanism, because it tells you where the limits really are rather than leaving you to guess.

A web page runs as untrusted code in a sandbox. The list of installed extensions lives on the other side of that boundary, in the browser itself. The API that can read it, chrome.management, is only callable from an extension that has explicitly requested the management permission — and a page is not an extension. There is no equivalent for page JavaScript. It is not that Canvas chooses not to look; it is that nothing exists for it to call.

This is also why the question "can Canvas tell I have an extension installed" and "can Canvas tell something modified the page" are different questions. The second one has a less comfortable answer.

The one way a page can probe for a specific extension

Here is the caveat almost nobody includes, and the reason this article says "the honest answer".

A page cannot ask for a list. It can, however, guess. Every extension has a fixed ID, and extensions can declare certain files as web-accessible resources, meaning ordinary pages are allowed to load them. If an extension does that, any page can attempt to fetch a known file at chrome-extension://<the-id>/<the-file>. If the fetch succeeds, that extension is installed. If it fails, it is not.

Three things limit how much this matters in practice:

• It only works per-extension. The page has to already know the exact ID and filename it is looking for. It cannot discover anything it was not explicitly built to look for.
• Someone has to build it deliberately. This is not a feature Canvas ships. It would be custom code written to hunt for a specific, named extension.
• Extensions can defend against it. Manifest V3 added use_dynamic_url, which randomises the resource URL per browsing session, so a fixed guess no longer resolves.

There is no public evidence of Canvas doing this, and it would be an odd thing for an LMS to build. But "a website physically cannot know" is slightly too strong a claim, and you deserve the accurate version.

Behavioural signals are the realistic concern

Forget enumeration for a moment. A page can see its own DOM. If something inserts a visible panel into a question, changes an answer without a corresponding click, or fills a field faster than a human could type, all of that happens inside the page's own document where its JavaScript can observe it.

Nobody has to identify which extension did it. In practice this is the gap that matters, and it is the reason tools that avoid drawing anything on screen behave differently from tools that inject a large visible card.

What proctoring tools actually ask for

If an extension-based proctor is in play, its permissions are published in the Chrome Web Store listing. It is worth reading them once. The ones that matter:

• Management. Read the list of installed extensions, and in some cases disable them for the duration of an exam.
• Tabs. See the URLs and titles of your open tabs, not merely that focus was lost.
• Desktop capture. Record the screen, including windows outside the browser.
• Camera and microphone. Granted through the normal browser prompt, which you have to accept.

That is a categorically different level of access from a web page, and it is why the two halves of this question have opposite answers.

What this means in practice

Work out which situation you are in before worrying about anything else:

• No proctoring. Your extensions are not visible. What exists is the Canvas attempt log, and the thing worth caring about is whether that log reads like an ordinary attempt.
• Extension-based proctoring. Assume everything installed is visible. Disabling is not reliable, because a disabled extension is still installed and still enumerable. Removal is the only honest answer.
• Lockdown browser. Your normal browser profile is not running at all, so nothing in it is relevant.