Tab-specific sidePanel inconsistencies when opening new tabs/switching tabs

[twschiller]

Context

• The sidePanel API lets you create tab-specific panels: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/sidePanel#type-OpenOptions
• The behavior of tab-specific panels is inconsistent across Chrome/MS Edge:
  • Chrome: if a tab has a tab-specific sidePanel and you open a new tab, the sidePanel remains in the original tab (In my opinion, this is the preferred behavior)
  • MS Edge: the sidePanel in the original tab is closed if you open a new tab. Therefore, the user loses any form state, etc. that was in that sidePanel
• Is that inconsistency intentional? Or a bug in the MS Edge implementation of the API?

Related Discussions

• #8206: playwright tests for MS Edge sidebar links pixiebrix/pixiebrix-extension#8216 (comment)
• Sidebar API for extensions is now live! microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions#95 (comment)

Related Bugs/Other Issues

• Edge extension side panel populating same data to all tabs microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions#144

[oliverdunk]

Adding follow-up label to confirm Chrome's current implementation is the desired behavior (I think it is).

[mukul-p]

I observed similar behaviour with these two samples on Edge and Chrome
https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-extensions-samples/tree/main/functional-samples/cookbook.sidepanel-open
https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chrome-extensions-samples/tree/main/functional-samples/cookbook.sidepanel-multiple

Oliver, please check if these are expected.
Todd, can you respond on the Edge specific Github issue with more details (and a sample).

This issue is deemed to be Chromium specific, I am not sure what is expected from the other browser triages.

[twschiller]

Todd, can you respond on the Edge specific Github issue with more details (and a sample).

@mukul-p you'd like me to open an issue here: https://github.com/microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions/issues? Or respond on the discussion? microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions#144

In our extension, we use chrome.sidePanel.setOptions to set the tab-specific page (on browser action), and pass a tabId in a query parameter so the panel is aware of what tab it's associated with:

chrome.sidePanel.setOptions({
  tabId,
  path: `/sidebar.html?tabId=${tabId}`,
});

Our expectation/desired behavior is just that when our extension opens a tab-specific panel on a page, it's not automatically closed when the user opens a new tab/switches tabs.

As an aside, I suspect the MS Edge behavior might be the cause/correlated with a browser crash when clicking a target _blank link in a tab-specific panel: microsoft/MicrosoftEdge-Extensions#145