Chrome is geting native "browser" namespace, is webextension-polyfill ready/compatible?

[Juraj-Masiar]

The news is here:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/gK1Sd57p4go

But if I'm reading the source code here correctly, this means that the webextension-polyfill will stop working when it detects the browser namespace.

And with that, the ability to reply with Promise in onMessage handlers will stop working. Right?
This missing feature is tracked by Chrome (4 years) here:
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40753031

[Rob--W]

@oliverdunk ^

[jaccarmac]

I think I'm experiencing this in Chrome 136.0.7081.2. Polyfilled message listeners don't seem to be sending data back after the update.

[Rob--W]

FYI: Chrome's new browser namespace supports Promise as return value to onMessage listeners.

[Rob--W]

FYI: Chrome's new browser namespace supports Promise as return value to onMessage listeners.

[agch-dev]

I am now getting issues with the polyfill when doing Browser.devtools.panels.create(...) since my Arc browser updated a few days ago. I am getting similar issues on other browsers like Edge, Brave, Opera and more.

The error I am getting in the extension errors is:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'panels')

If i use chrome.devtools.panels.create(...) it starts working again. It is of note that Browser.devtools.... stopped working without any changes to the extension.

It is probably related to this thread as doing browser. directly as one does with chrome doesn't work either. For this extension that is internal and doesn't need to support Firefox I will just start using chrome. but I have another extension that more heavily relies on the polyfill and i was hoping to make it also work on firefox.

[Rob--W]

I am now getting issues with the polyfill when doing Browser.devtools.panels.create(...) since my Arc browser updated a few days ago. I am getting similar issues on other browsers like Edge, Brave, Opera and more.

This is caused by Chrome's incomplete support for Promises in the browser.devtools API. As a result of this regression, Chrome disabled support for the browser namespace.

See https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40753031#comment41 and surrounding comments for the revert of the feature,

And https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41483013 for the crbug about missing Promise support in the devtools API.

[agch-dev]

@Rob--W thanks for the reply! i see that the revert is not released yet and it is on version 145.0.7632.16 while Arc for example is on Chromium version 144.0.7559.60. I will check the other browsers but i think I'll have to find a workaround in the meantime.

For the internal extension I will just use chrome.devtoolsdirectly for now.

[oliverdunk]

@Rob--W thanks for the reply! i see that the revert is not released yet and it is on version 145.0.7632.16 while Arc for example is on Chromium version 144.0.7559.60. I will check the other browsers but i think I'll have to find a workaround in the meantime.

Just to clarify here, as well as disabling the feature by default, we have also turned off the feature via finch: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-finch. That may not carry across to other Chromium browsers but it does mean that in most cases it should be disabled in Google Chrome without the need for an update.

[Juraj-Masiar]

I can confirm it's definitely disabled on Chrome Version 144.0.7559.97 (Official Build) (64-bit)
UPDATE:
Just to note, also my fully updated Brave, Vivaldi and Opera seems to reverted to Proxy (polyfill), but Edge Version 144.0.3719.82 stayed on the native browser:

Or maybe my Edge is just outdated for some reason.