You can glean a bit of that information from http://blockchain.info/status_check which is the script pingdom monitors. Restart times are not available to the web interface since it's literally just a bash script script that kills bitcoind every few hours.
Why does the extension now require these permissions?
The permissions were reverted back to their old permissions after the RPC interaction functionality was moved to a separate extension. The extension can only read data at blockchain.info, www.blockchain.info and local.blockchain.info (Points to localhost for development).
Because bitcoin: would not work with some of the social media share links, I think Facebook and G+ would accept bitcoin:// links but not bitcoin:
I really don't think it is a big deal. Nearly all APIs where you register a protocol handler register the prefix e.g. "bitcoin" not specifying bitcoin:// or bitcoin: so it seems logical that software should support both. Adding support to Bitcoinj (which blockchain uses) was a one line addition uriString = uriString.replace("bitcoin://", "bitcoin:");
It's not quite a one line change because it also needs changing on the android and iPhone app.
Will do.
i have vanitygen running and sometimes it finds 200 matching addresses
I think it would be better to add support for the vanitygen format. What does the output look like? JSON?