Chrome/Web Extensions: Global Shortcut Strange Behaviour

While working on Bookee, I discovered some strange behaviour with respect to keyboard shortcuts to activate Chrome (and likely Web) Extensions.

When the scope for a Chrome or Web Extension is set to Global (rather than Chrome), the background script (or worker script for mv3) can have trouble detecting whether the current page is the new-tab page.

I wrote about the Global Shortcut earlier, which provides more context on how to allow your extension users to change a keyboard combination's scope.

I'm still working on diagnosing why the change of scope causes issues with the tab URL detection. More to come.

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Updates

• Turns out this was a bit of a changing a lightbulb experience. It took me a while to figure it all out. The root of the issue was that the extension didn't have access to the url property for all tabs.
• The reason this problem only showed up with the global shortcut was because I could read the url property for a focused tab. But since the global shortcut was being triggered from outside Chrome, I don't believe that the concept of a "focused tab" actually existed.
• Anyway, to get around this, I needed to request the tabs permission in my manifest.json file, and re-architect a few things around command event listeners.