plasmo VS webextension-polyfill

Ooof!! It is an... interesting time right now in extensions land. The switch from MV2 to MV3 is a bit chaotic but hopefully tools like this (Bedframe) and tools like [Plasmo](https://github.com/PlasmoHQ/plasmo) start to inject some freshness in the space.

GitHub: https://github.com/PlasmoHQ/plasmo

Shameless plug, but we built the Plasmo Framework to make that (and a lot more) super easy: https://github.com/plasmohq/plasmo

Thanks! We wrote a custom Parcel runtime [1] inspired by Parcel's HMR runtime (which was too bloated and buggy for us) that injects a web socket listener into the development build of the extension.

Whenever a bundle change happens, Parcel sends it the refresh message and it either does `chrome.runtime.reload()` or `location.reload()` depending on the context.

[1]: https://github.com/PlasmoHQ/plasmo/blob/main/packages/parcel...

The Browser Extension Working Group at W3.org proposes the web standards based on the Chrome extension manifest, which supports all web browsers. Based on that proposal, Mozilla has released the Browser Extension Polyfill library that supports the modern promise pattern instead of callback. Therefore, if you import this polyfill library, theoretically, your Chrome extension quickly turns into the browser extension that runs on multiple browser engines.

I've written extensions before and Firefox has a very good polyfill [0] that makes it quite easy to write extensions for all browsers. It does get a bit trickier if you also want to incorporate TypeScript [1] or React however.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill

[1] https://github.com/Lusito/webextension-polyfill-ts

I used WebExtension polyfill[0] when adapting my FF addon to Chrome and admittedly all the intricate differences between APIs still costed me half a day of work.

I managed to have it done with only a few places where I branch on navigator.vendor, but If I wanted to ship different versions to AMO and CWS, I'd make use of something like DefinePlugin[1] for webpack to include/exclude code based on build target.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill/

[1] https://github.com/webpack/docs/wiki/list-of-plugins#definep...

Initially I created wrapper functions to convert Chrome functions that require callback to return promise instead. The better approach, as I found out later, is probably to use webextension-polyfill from Mozilla and its types.

I mean, the browser apis are close (and Mozilla still has much better documentation) but there are a LOT of edges cases where behavior diverges.

Frankly - I'm a little peeved that Optional permissions in Firefox are STILL broken - The prompt can only be triggered in response to a user action, and Firefox blows the fuck up if you put a promise anywhere in between the user click and the call to the api. Which is hugely ironic, since Mozilla is the one pushing to move all the webext APIs to be promise based (and provides a nice helpful library for Chrome/Edge/Safari support: https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill) which... doesn't work on their platform. Doubly ironic, since the result is that most FF extensions just ask for more permissions up front, which is exactly the opposite of what you'd want in the "secure/private" world Mozilla claims they're pushing towards.

I would probably look into using https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill/ from the start. From my point of view the the Promise based API is much nicer to use.

Looks like there's a polyfill you can use https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill