Proposal: webNavigation.onBeforeRedirect event

[oliverdunk]

At 1Password, we're looking to track redirects as part of a new autosave feature we're working on. In most browsers the existing webRequest.* APIs allow this but understandably Apple have chosen not to implement this in Safari on iOS. After chatting to @xeenon, instead of proposing that entire set of APIs is introduced, I propose adding a webNavigation.onBeforeRedirect event that has similar behaviour to webRequest.onBeforeRedirect but fires only for frame (top and subframe) navigations.

We have the following requirements (which I think are hopefully fairly simple):

• Tells us about 302 redirects
• Provides a status code that we can use to see the type of redirect that happened

[Smile4ever]

Why not implement webRequest.onBeforeRedirect in Safari/iOS?

[oliverdunk]

Why not implement webRequest.onBeforeRedirect in Safari/iOS?

This would definitely solve the problem, but Safari have chosen not to implement webRequest because it fires for all requests and is a noisy API that can keep non-persistent background pages alive. With that in mind - it doesn't feel like an API that has a good chance of being implemented.