webextension-polyfill ?

[MentalGear]

Since plasmo's main goal is to be a cross-browser extension framework, I'm surprised that webextension-polyfill is not added by default to have a common API to access tabs, etc with .browser. Is there a specific reason this is left to userland?

[louisgv]

1. That package throws a top-level runtime side-effect that cannot be caught -> worst sin for a polyfill
2. It contains more tech-debt than actual solutions (it's made to polyfill chrome to be compatible with firefox's async, which are now unnecessary as of Chrome v100 with native promise-based API).
3. User who are aware of this package would likely want to use it as-is instead of a magic top-level injection. We should only inject common web runtime and nodejs runtime (that're needed for bundler and nodejs ecosystem compats). Extension runtime itself is... a tricky one.

See: mozilla/webextension-polyfill#329

[ramsrib]

Do you guys recommend any other polyfill or approach to work with multiple browsers?

[laugri]

@louisgv Same question for me. I am confused as to what is the preferred approach here and the documentation doesn't mention this as far as I can tell. Would appreciate any pointer !

[louisgv]

Hi all, by what I said above, you should install and use the web-extension-polyfill if you're fully aware of its capabilities and limitations.

If you are using it just to align the API calls between browsers, that's unnecessary for the most part since their APIs are now very similar.

All you need is something like const extRuntime = browser || chrome. The specific code is in the storage package xD