Programming Tutorials

  Migrating to Manifest V3 (MV3) has been a painful process for developers relying on background DOM access. If you are building a web scraper or an extension that processes external content, you have likely hit the infamous   ReferenceError: DOMParser is not defined   or   window is not defined . This happens because MV3 replaces background pages with  Service Workers . Service Workers run in a separate thread designed for network proxying and caching, not for UI rendering. They do not have access to the DOM API. Previously, developers resorted to bulky libraries like  cheerio  or  jsdom  to parse HTML strings, drastically increasing bundle size. Others used hidden iframes, which MV3 creates significant friction against via Content Security Policy (CSP). The correct, modern solution is the  Offscreen API . The Root Cause: Service Worker Limitations To fix the problem, we must understand the architectural constraint. In Manifest V2, the ...

  If you have attempted to bring the modern React developer experience (DX) to Chrome Extension development, you have likely hit a specific, workflow-killing wall. You set up Vite, get the popup rendering locally, but the moment you touch a Content Script, the abstraction leaks. HMR stops working. Styles don't update. You find yourself manually reloading the extension in  chrome://extensions  and refreshing the target web page just to see a one-line code change. This creates a feedback loop latency that makes modern UI development impossible. This guide details exactly why standard Vite configurations fail in the browser extension context and provides a rigorous, production-ready architecture using React, Vite, TypeScript, and CRXJS to solve it. The Root Cause: Why Standard HMR Fails in Extensions To fix the problem, we must understand the architecture of the browser runtime. Standard Vite HMR relies on a WebSocket connection between the browser client and the local devel...