In the extension authors call today, it was confirmed that extension authors want to share the following items when extensions are updated. We also know that customers don't want to be bombarded by welcome/update pages opening when extensions are updated.

• New features
• Fixed issues
• Features/UI that moved
• Images or gifs showing how new features work
• Guided tours of new/updated features

With that in mind, it's possible to alert customers that extensions have been updated and allow them to go as deep as they want, whenever they want, to learn about new features and fixes.

Provide a new UI element in the activity bar of a "gift" or something similar to indicate extensions have been updated.

The badge count would indicate how many extensions have been updated and clicking the "gift" icon would show an overlay with a short blurb taken from the extension changelog (automatically taken from the .md).

Firefox does something like this:

This allows customers to mark items as "read" to remove the badge count; out out of future update notifications; and click into the "learn more" link to go into the extension's changelog in the extension view.

Showing the changelog could be automatic, but in future iterations we could create richer experiences such as overlays or guided tours. This would require an API that extensions would expose to launch into the update experience.