1891478 - Implement documentId in extension APIs

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

The extension API currently has tabId + frameId to identify specific frames. Several APIs (e.g. scripting.executeScript) support a way to run code in that specific frame. The issue with the current API is that the document may have navigated between notifying the extension and the call to scripting.executeScript. We therefore need a way for extensions to target specific documents, independent of the frame.

Chrome introduced the documentId concept to identify specific document instances, coupled with the documentLifeCycle and frameType properties. This was announced at https://developer.chrome.com/blog/extension-instantnav/

Note: in the WECG there are several requests/proposals/enhancements that rely on documentId as a primitive: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues?q=is%3Aissue+documentId

Comment 1

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

There is still no official "spec" for documentId, but we discussed runtime.getDocumentId (to complement runtime.getFrameId) at https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/800.

Comment 2

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

New WECG ticket filed about standardizing documentId: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/890

I left a comment describing all APIs that currently support documentId in Chrome, at https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/890#issuecomment-3446258636