Cross-platform devtools in electron app.

[jcblw]

It would be nice to be able to put Finch dev tools in an electron app. Right now the dev tools only work for Chrome, but the support library is now starting to support a wide array of different Platforms: Safari, Safari iOS, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Chrome. It would be extremely beneficial if we were able to support more of those platforms. To do this we need to rethink how the dev tools communicate with the library.

Right now we make an external communication between two extensions, this is an API that is only supported in Chrome. This is largely why the support for the dev tools only works on Chrome. We would need to change this behavior to allow for WS connections to support something like an electron app, and with Safari I think we would need secure web sockets...

We should start evaluating what this looks like, what is the cost, and can we possibly support something like Safari with these devtools?

There might be other solutions to this, just it seems like Safari is the best bet.

[jcblw]

External messaging is supported by Edge, and Opera too. Firefox and Safari are the ones that does not support the API.

[jcblw]

I am in a web extension slack group and posed the question about this dev tools extension that I am trying to solve here. There are a few suggestions that we should look into as possible solutions that may not require us to go down this rabbit hole of setting up a full electron app.

• Allow for shared storage via a domain, we can lock this into the Finch GraphQL docs domain
• Connect the extensions together via webRTC