Consider support for debugging chrome/web extensions

[jonathanKingston]

Currently there isn't support for this addon in the 'Browser Toolbox' or when using about:debugging for a WebExtension.

This makes debugging any WebExtension that uses sockets very hard to debug within Firefox.

[janodvarko]

Do you have an example WebExtension that uses sockets?

Honza

[jonathanKingston]

The one I was trying to debug was this patch:
jonathanKingston/Signal-Desktop@de95079

To run the extension clone my version of the repo in the branch firefox-extension. Then load in about:debugging.

You can see where I was manually using console.logs to try and check before the data is sent over the sockets. Having an idea of what messages are passed by Firefox would make this a lot simpler to debug.

[janodvarko]

@esphen Any tips who we could solve this?

Honza

[eliihen]

Ooh, signal being developed for Firefox? Sweet, I've been waiting for that.

I definitely agree that this would be a pretty useful feature, so I looked into this. In my limited research, I couldn't find any devtools extensions that were present in the Browser Toolbox, only in the F12 developer tools.

The way I see it is there are two ways forward:

1. Figure out if Firefox supports devtools extensions in the Browser Toolbox. Looks to me like no, but I could be wrong. I understand why it wouldn't, as that could potentially have significant security implications. In any case, doing this might need an extension to the devtools API.
2. Integrate websocket monitor into the devtools directly. This has been talked about before, but I don't know where we currently stand on this.

[jonathanKingston]

To clarify, the Signal work was me mostly messing about and I wasn't able to debug everything to put in a patch to them.

I opened #75 to discuss the lifetime of this extension.