[BUG] sendViaRelay works in Chrome but not Firefox

[kenkantzer-truss]

What happened?

Firstly, thanks for making this framework - I have a chrome extension, works great.

I'm trying to port the extension to firefox. I've narrowed down the issue to a hanging call to @plasmohq/messaging:

var resp = await sendViaRelay({
      name: "get-email"
    });

As context, I'm calling sendViaRelay within our web app, which is within an iframe, inside of popup.ts:

import { useState } from "react"
import { sendToBackground } from "@plasmohq/messaging"

function IndexPopup() {
    const [data, setData] = useState("")

    return (
        <div>
            <iframe style={{ margin:0, padding: 0, border: "none", height: "580px", width: "431px" }} src={process.env.PLASMO_PUBLIC_IFRAME_DEFAULT_OPEN_PATH}></iframe>
        </div>
    )
}

export default IndexPopup

This is working in Chrome (the only trick there was making sure to set all_frames: true), but for some reason, Firefox doesn't seem to like sendViaRelay (I'd show a console log error message, but sadly, firefox doesn't allow you to see console messages for iframes within popup - makes this more challenging!).

Is sendViaRelay and firefox not playing nice a known thing?

Version

Latest

What OS are you seeing the problem on?

MacOSX

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Firefox

Relevant log output

I'd show a console log error message, but sadly, firefox doesn't allow you to see console messages for iframes within popup - makes this more challenging!

(OPTIONAL) Contact Details

[email protected]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct
• I checked the current issues for duplicate problems.

[louisgv]

Is sendViaRelay and firefox not playing nice a known thing?

This is likely the case - if you're already investigating this, can you take a look at what port API is FF supporting and do they expose them under the chrome namespace or the browser namespace? - We might need to add the polyfill to messaging API in the next version. Would love some help on investigating this!

[kenkantzer-truss]

ah @louisgv, this looks like a known problem:

Google Chrome uses chrome while Mozilla Firefox, the old Microsoft Edge and Safari also support the browser-neutral browser

It looks like Mozilla has a pretty extensive polyfill for going from browser API to chrome API: ...so it seems like the need would be to go from chrome.runtime to browser.runtime for Firefox/Edge support, and use Mozilla's polyfill to get chrome support.

There's of course this little gem from the Chromium bug report:

One key difference to note while adding this is that the WebExtensions spec is largely promise-based, while the chrome.* APIs are callback-based. Oh, and as a stop-gap solution, Mozilla has had a polyfill [2] out for a while to help people use the same extension code in Chrome and Firefox (and Edge) both.

Which means that places like sendMessage's callback need to be changed? I don't have the skill to switch things over to using the polyfill, but would be happy to test a build of @plasmohq/messaging & do some tweaking.

[louisgv]

It looks like Mozilla has a pretty extensive polyfill for going from browser API to chrome API: ...so it seems like the need would be to go from chrome.runtime to browser.runtime for Firefox/Edge support, and use Mozilla's polyfill to get chrome support.

One issue with this polyfill is that it's more or less just a promisified module over browser instead of an actual polyfill. And it throws on API unavailable at import - which is nuts! - IMO Polyfill should not throw runtime errors on import. If API is unavailable, mock stuff out or have a fallback hatch, or throw on invocation.

The error it throws break a bunch of stuff in a manner that has no way to go around them lol

@kenkantzer-truss The new Relay API should decoupled from the chrome.runtime stuff so you can now walk around this issue. I've created a PR to switch over to the new promise API as well, which will hopefully fix the issue you are having with chrome runtime:

#462

[weltan]

oo, thanks @louisgv - is this PR in @plasmohq/messaging 0.1.4 yet? happy to I give it a try!

[louisgv]

@weltan yup, please try it out!