Support Chrome manifest v3 APIs

[avalanche1]

Is this lib compatible with Chrome manifest v3?
I haven't found any mentions in the docs.

[avalanche1]

If not - are you planning to implement the support?

[Rob--W]

Chrome will support promises at the chrome. namespace in browser, and still support the callback-based APIs.

The polyfill invokes methods in the chrome. namespace using callbacks and returns a Promise, for methods that are explicitly supported. When a method is not explicitly recognized, the parameters to the API call are passed as-is to the underlying chrome. namespace. In manifest v3, Chrome's APIs support promises too, so the return values would still be promises. In either case, the polyfill will provide support for the APIs as expected.

We'll keep this bug open, and close it once we've added integration tests.

[AhsanAyaz]

Chrome will support promises at the chrome. namespace in browser, and still support the callback-based APIs.

The polyfill invokes methods in the chrome. namespace using callbacks and returns a Promise, for methods that are explicitly supported. When a method is not explicitly recognized, the parameters to the API call are passed as-is to the underlying chrome. namespace. In manifest v3, Chrome's APIs support promises too, so the return values would still be promises. In either case, the polyfill will provide support for the APIs as expected.

We'll keep this bug open, and close it once we've added integration tests.

Is there any update on this? It seems like the extensions break with servicewoker+background script combo in manifest v3.

[avalanche1]

@AhsanAyaz you mean servicewoker+**content script** combo in manifest v3?

[AhsanAyaz]

@avalanche1 . No I mean using the background.js or any file as a service worker with webextension-polyfill doesn't work because of the window being undefined.

[Rob--W]

@avalanche1 . No I mean using the background.js or any file as a service worker with webextension-polyfill doesn't work because of the window being undefined.

The polyfill does not use window, but globalThis. Are you using the latest version of the polyfill?

[getify]

I'm attempting to convert my working v2 extension to v3... but experiencing some issues. I am using importScripts(..) in my formerly-background-now-service-worker script to bring in this polyfill.

In particular, since v3 consolidates pageAction and browserAction into just action, I changed my calls from browser.pageAction.show(..) to browser.action.show(..), but that's throwing the exception: "browser.action.show is not a function". I then tried just directly chrome.action.show(..), but that's the same exception. And I then I tried the old browser.pageAction.show(..), but that gives an exception indicating that browser.pageAction is undefined (so thus the show property access fails).

Is this a problem with chrome's v3 manifest having changed or deprecated that function name? Or is this a problem with this polyfill? I can't seem to get properly updated info on the interplay between the v3 changes and this polyfill.

[getify]

Yes I'm sure I'm in manifest v3, because my other changes (including changes in the manifest, like "service_worker") are working as expected. Moreover, chrome.action is present and valid.

Specifically, the error I'm getting is that chrome.action (or browser.action) do not have a show(..) function. In manifest-v2 browser.pageAction.show(..) works great, but I can't seem to get the equivalent to work in manifest-v3 via chrome.action.show(..) or browser.action.show(..) -- they both throw an exception for show(..) not being a function (it's undefined).

[meandavejustice]

@getify chrome.action.show Is not in mv3. You may be looking for setPopup

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/action/

[getify]

They didn't list throwing away show(..) in the breaking changes from manifest v2 to v3... but it does seem like setPopup(..) is roughly equivalent... though now I have to pass the URL for the HTML page whereas in v2 that URL is specified in the manifest itself.

In any case, I've now passed that error, and encountered a variety of others. For example, my extension (obviously) has a popup, and I used to be able to call browser.extension.getViews({ type: "popup" }) to get references to all instances of my extension's popup, so that I could get call postMessage(..) on each reference to send them all messages.

getViews(..) is another one which apparently was discarded from v2 to v3. :( A similar (but not equivalent or equivalent) seems to be action.getPopup(..). Sadly, that function doesn't get the popup window reference itself, it just gets the URL of the popup... which isn't at all helpful since I already manually provided that URL.

In any case, sorry to be rambling here... it seems that the conversion from v2 to v3 is NOT particularly straightforward the way the migration guide makes it seem. There's quite a bit of breaking change behavior where they apparently decided people didn't need (or shouldn't need) to do things that were perfectly valid/useful in v2.

I don't guess that my problems right now are particularly related to this polyfill, so I don't need to keep creating noise here. Sorry!

If anyone has any suggested resources on how to navigate all these breaking changes, I'd certainly love to read it. I feel like I'm flailing in the dark here, because just about everything I google search about reveals stuff about v2 and nobody seems to have much concrete answers on v3.

Side note: it's annoying that Chrome is already warning (with logged errors) about manifest v2 extensions going away, but the v3 stuff we're supposed to convert to is not even fully shipped, and the docs for it are painfully lacking. Maybe I'm just in the pain because I decided to be proactive when I saw the error, and perhaps I should just sleep on this for about 6 months while more of this bakes fully.