Chrome 89 will break devtools for the background service worker

[wOxxOm]

See https://crbug.com/1180613 - they decided not to backport the fix into Chrome 89 so it'll have the bugged devtools with just a half of the tabs when you click "inspect service worker" in chrome://extensions UI.

Here's a workaround:

1. open any page from your extension directory/package
   
   (if you don't have any, simply open manifest.json of your extension in a tab using a URL like chrome-extension://abcdef/manifest.json where abcdef is the id of your extension, shown in chrome://extensions page when developer mode is enabled)
   
   
2. open devtools, go to the Sources tab and expand the entry for the worker or just press Ctrl-P and type the file name of the background script, you can also open it from the Application tab of devtools, in the Service Worker section.
   
   
3. If you want to switch to the console of the worker, use the context switcher in the toolbar of devtools console
   
   
   This context switcher will also change automatically if a breakpoint triggers in the worker context.

[wOxxOm]

Ideally, announcements like this should be made by Chromium team, otherwise it looks like they totally don't care.

[Simeon Vincent]

Thanks for calling this out, wOxxOm. This email was the first I heard of this bug or the resolution. I'm planning to post something about this on developer.chrome.com when 89 reaches stable.

Simeon - @dotproto

Chrome Extensions DevRel

On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 9:11 AM wOxxOm <wox...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ideally, announcements like this should be made by Chromium team, otherwise it looks like they totally don't care.

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[wOxxOm]

I meant the chromium team as a whole and devtools team in particular, they knew that not backporting the fix is breaking an important part of extensions development process, but they didn't bother making a public post about it. Looks like extensions simply aren't listed in their internal memo about what constitutes an important breakage, which seems in line with the overall attitude of the entire team who effectively ignore all these hundreds of bug reports about extensions for years. I've seen only a couple of developers who consistently bother informing the extension community of the breakages and the workarounds, most prominently lukasza@ for CORS/CORB and of course the extensions team's members.