1294319 - webextension api(or firefox internal) bug: chrome is not defined

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[nomiadozy]

Attachment: firefoxbug.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2816.4 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Two examples
First example: I developed a extension using the message passing api last week, it works fine, and changed nothing after a week, things goes wrong(message passing goes wrong), I can see an error in the browser console, it says "Port error: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist". i googled around, and tried every solution(api version, backgroundjs->backgroundpage,etc) suggested, error still appear in the console. Then i try to install your demo extensions. each of them throw an error "chrome is not defined". But after 12 hours, i tried again. all of them and my extension worked again. However, after 3 hours by then, error throwed again. and then I try your official demo.(Second example)

Second example: (in about:debugging page)Try to install the tabs-tabs-tabs extension from you official webextension demo(https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples), sometimes it works but sometimes it will not, the error in the console says: chrome is not defined

both these two examples are not easy to reproduce the bug. But they all works in google chrome.




Actual results:

Result for first example:
the error in the console says "Port error: Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist"

Result for second example: 
sometimes the tabs-tabs-tabs demo is totally unusable.  the error in the console says: chrome is not defined.  I've attached the screenshot of the error message.


I don't know if you will help with this issue if this bug is not 100% reproduceable. But I think this is probably a internal bug. Hope you could help with this.


Expected results:

For the first example:
should pass a simple message between content script and background.js

For the second example:
should be able to "open a new tab", "reload active tab", "create new tab", "duplicate active tab".

Comment 1

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

Please attach a copy of the extension that is failing.

As for the "chrome is not defined" errors, they're coming from residual code from your other extension, not from the example extension.