refactor(extension): set background script as non persistent and remove html template

[lutangar]

background script do not use any persistent background feature, this was a legacy thing, this will definitely be a big take on performance improvement
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/background_migration

[MaartenLMEM]

Looks fine. ^^

[JalilArfaoui]

Nice catch !

But what about our periodic refreshs ? Shouldn’t we set an browser.alarms ? 

Also, it seems non-persistent background is not supported by Firefox yet :-(

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/background
(But that’s OK as it will just run in a persistent manner …)

[lutangar]

But what about our periodic refreshs

@JalilArfaoui could you point me to the problematic lines?

[JalilArfaoui]

But what about our periodic refreshs

@JalilArfaoui could you point me to the problematic lines?

In src/app/background/sagas/refreshMatchingContexts.ts and src/app/background/sagas/refreshContributors.ts for instance, we have :

    while (true) {
      yield delay(refreshInterval);
      yield call(refreshMatchingContexts);
    }

which I guess is implemented by setTimeout, which won’t work in non-persistant mode, if I understood correctly the documentation you pointed to …

[JalilArfaoui]

We may have the same issue in src/app/background/sagas/lib/sendToTab.saga.ts …

[lutangar]

Alright, nice catch, I'll look into it...

[lutangar]

Well, let's forget about that for the time being, it's not that trival, and it need a new alarms permission.

Notes:
export const delay = (ms) => new Promise(res => // do alarm stuff here)
and
https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/alarms/create

[JalilArfaoui]

Yep … Maybe for the coming refactor/clean phase …

[JalilArfaoui]

@lutangar should we close this one ?

[lutangar]

I think this would bring a significant performance boost (memory footprint) and might be easier on the cpu as well so I'd like to put this light. I'll might add a connected issue.

[lutangar]

After some more investigation, switching to alarm might not be useful as in manifest v3 the background persistence thing seems to be deprecated... there might still be performant boost to take from switching to the alarms API tho.

This PR is still a WIP it'll require a bit more work to add some kind of alarm registry to make the onAlarm eventListener able to handle all alarms...