Structured clone for extension messaging

[Justin Lulejian]

Hi all,

I just published a blog post about a new feature for Chrome Extensions: Unlock Structured Clone for Chrome Extension Messaging.

Starting in Chrome 148, you can opt-in to use the structured clone algorithm for message serialization instead of JSON. This modernization allows you to send more complex data types—like Map, Set, Blob, and File—directly between extension contexts without the need for manual serialization workarounds.

To enable this, simply add the following key and value to your manifest.json:

```
{ "message_serialization": "structured_clone" }
```

We hope this provides more flexibility and power when building extensions!

Thanks,

Justin, on behalf of the Chromium Extensions Team

[Cuyler Stuwe]

Thanks for this!

I think it would be useful to write (here and/or in the blog post) about when and why you’d pick one over the other (especially given that the blog shows that you intend to support both indefinitely).

For example, several years ago, the structured clone implementation seemed to be meaningfully-less performant than serialization for large simple objects across multiple browsers (including Chromium-based browsers). No idea whether this is still the case today. Is it?

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