Inconsistency: scripting.registerContentScripts and contentScripts.register

[carlosjeurissen]

Currently Chromium and Firefox have a different API for registering contentScripts.

Firefox was the first to implement browser.contentScripts.register. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/contentScripts/register.

Chromium added / is about to add chrome.scripting.registerContentScripts. See:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/content_scripts/ and
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1054624

Since these APIs seem to do about the same thing, we should find ways to bring them closer together / work towards a single API design.

[Rob--W]

Firefox will deprecate the contentScripts API in favor of the scripting API namespace.

One design issue with contentScripts.register is that the lifetime of the script is tied to the lifetime of the calling page (e.g. background page). The scripting API fixes that.

[carlosjeurissen]

Thanks so much for the update Rob! Is Firefox considering supporting this in MV2 as well? Or are there any specific reasons either technical or others to restrict it to MV3?

[Rob--W]

We're currently developing "new" features behind a flag for MV3, but if the API is mature I wouldn't rule out the possibility of making it available under MV2 too.

[Rob--W]

I believe that this issue has been resolved. We may file new issues for the scripting API in the future, but the question asked here has been answered.