I have a Chrome Extension that is using the experimental sidebar API. It works beautifully when it is unpacked, but if I am running a packed version, and restart my browser, it no longer recognizes that I have asked for the sidebar in the manifest. I start getting these errors everywhere the sidebar is referenced:
Error during experimental.sidebar.getState: This extension has no sidebar specified.
This seems like it might be a bug in the sidebar API; or am I missing something obvious?
Though the sidebar API is not documented anymore, code support for it has not been removed. If you are specifying your use of the sidebar as
"sidebar": {}in your manifest file, you are most likely running into a Chrome bug where object literals with empty values are removed when a packed extension is loaded at startup.A workaround is to include a dummy key in the sidebar dictionary (e.g. use
sidebar": {"dummy": 1}instead).