Support modifying the builtin extension's manifest.json

[RobertCraigie]

It would be great if the builtin manifest.json could be changed https://github.com/glide-browser/glide/blob/main/src/browser/extensions/glide/manifest.json, e.g. to include search engines, content scripts or many other things.

[poslat-pismo]

[RobertCraigie]

@poslat-pismo I might be missing something but I don't see any reference to a "windows" permission in the firefox source, do you have any more information on it?

[ian-h-chamberlain]

Would a feature like this also allow userscripts to work? I see that userScripts was added then quickly removed in d337281

I was hoping it would be possible to use the browser.userScripts API (which seems to exist in glide.d.ts already) to add some custom scripts without the need for something like Tampermonkey / Greasemonkey, but so far everything I've tried has resulted in errors like

Uncaught (in promise) Error: Could not resolve `browser` property at path `userScripts.register` - `userScripts` was not defined

for something simple like this in config:

browser.userScripts.register([
  {
    id: "test",
    matches: ["*://*/*"],
    js: [{ code: "alert('hi');" }],
  },
]);

I wasn't sure if this would even be possible in Glide, but it seems like maybe with the right permissions it could be? Or perhaps there's some other way to accomplish the same thing?

[ian-h-chamberlain]

After a bit of experimentation, I discovered it's possible to just create your own extension, using the same ID as the builtin extension. When it's installed, Glide seems to treat it like any update to the builtin extension. I've got an example here that updates to Manifest V3 for the new APIs and requests userScripts as an optional permission: https://tangled.org/ian-h-chamberlain.com/glide-manifest-v3/blob/main/manifest.json

I'm using it like this:

glide.prefs.set('xpinstall.signatures.required', false)
glide.addons.install(
  'https://tangled.org/ian-h-chamberlain.com/glide-manifest-v3/tags/v1.134.3.0/download/glide_internal-1.134.3.0.zip',
  { force: true },
)

Once the addon is installed, it has to be manually granted permissions for the userscript APIs (intentional security decision by Firefox, as I understand it):

Once granted, my config is able to register userscripts!
This seems to work well enough for me. It would be nice to avoid the extra build + publish step etc. but I don't expect this to need very frequent updates since all the code can still go into glide.ts.