Is anyone else bothered by the lack of "Reload" button in the extension details page?

[Juraj M.]

if i got a dollar for every time I had to click back button just to reload my extension...

[Oliver Dunk]

Yes, 100%! I can't promise anything until it lands... but I've been playing around 😉

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/5462255

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

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[Juraj M.]

Thanks a lot!

What a great way to start a week with a good news! :)

🎉

[wOxxOm]

It'd be even better if we could reload just the service worker by pressing Ctrl-R (Cmd-R) in devtools, because reloading the entire extension is highly disruptive as it destroys the state in the extension's pages which may be very cumbersome to restore, especially since it orphanizes the already injected content scripts which no longer can communicate or access chrome API. It would also solve a longstanding inability to debug the first run of a service worker when it couldn't be registered due to an exception the source of which is not reported anywhere in UI.

[Oliver Dunk]

It'd be even better if we could reload just the service worker by pressing Ctrl-R (Cmd-R) in devtools

Absolutely, this is definitely something I want (I use that shortcut often with background pages). One tricky piece is that "reloading a service worker" isn't really a concept as far as I know. I don't think that's a hard blocker, and a reasonable solution is probably just to say we stop it and then once it's finished, start it again. It does mean there aren't any Chrome DevTools Protocol commands for this that already exist though and we would need to add something extension specific before we could wire up the UI in DevTools. There would also definitely need to be some conversations internally as I don't think everyone is aligned on that being the best path just yet.

It would also solve a longstanding inability to debug the first run of a service worker when it couldn't be registered due to an exception the source of which is not reported anywhere in UI.

From memory, we currently don't allow you to open DevTools at all if the service worker fails to register. Does that match your experience? If so, I imagine we would also want to look at fixing that for this to be helpful.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

[wOxxOm]

> reloading a service worker" isn't really a concept

There was a workaround: open any extension page (even manifest.json), go to Application -> Service worker and press Stop, Update, Start, Skip waiting. Now it's disabled as a tentative fix for registration issues.

>  From memory, we currently don't allow you to open DevTools at all if the service worker fails to register

Yeah. It'd be nice if pressing the devtools link for the extension would open devtools and repeat the attempt to register the service worker so that the exception would be shown, ideally in the interactive debugger so we can see the JS state.

[Gaurang Tandon]

Hijacking the thread a little, I use https://github.com/arikw/chrome-extensions-reloader with a hotkey on Cmd+Shift+E and I am able to reload my extensions without even visiting chrome://extensions page 😉

[Jackie Han]

I use https://github.com/arikw/chrome-extensions-reloader with a hotkey

Technically, that tool "disable" and "enable" extensions, it doesn't "reload" extensions. It can't replace "real reload".

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[Oliver Dunk]

Just a quick update here, the CL has landed and the reload button is available on the details page in Chrome 126+.

That's currently in beta and will go to stable in a couple of weeks :)

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

[Juraj M.]

Thanks a lot Oliver!

I've been already using it in Chrome Canary, great work :).

Thank you for making my life easier 🎉