[FEATURE REQUEST] Persistent ServiceWorker to run setInterval()

[wmbenedetto]

I'm the developer of StayFocusd, a popular Chrome extension that blocks time-wasting websites. It has been around since Jan 2010 and has 625,000 users, and the Manifest V3 switch from background pages to ServiceWorkers is going to kill the app.

The use-case is pretty simple. StayFocusd users add urls to a Blocked Sites list. They also have a Max Time Allowed for the day, say, 10 minutes. Whenever they are on a blocked site, StayFocusd decrements the Max Time Allowed. Once the Max Time Allowed hits zero, the blocked sites are blocked for the rest of the day.

To do this, StayFocusd keeps track of the url in the active tab. A setInterval() runs once per second and checks whether the current url is on the Blocked Sites list. If it is, it decrements the Max Time Allowed by 1 second.

As I understand it, the switch to ServiceWorkers means that there is no way to run a persistent setInterval(). That means there is no way for me to decrement the Max Time Allowed counter as users browse a blocked site, which essentially bricks my extension.

I understand some of the security and privacy reasons for switching to ServiceWorkers, and for them not being persistent. But please consider the legitimate use-cases like mine that are being affected by this. It seems like there's a need for a PersistentServiceWorker, possibly with a higher level of permissions that a user needs to opt into.

[jakearchibald]

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