Has anyone created a Chrome Extension with Rust?

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People,

I am interested in Rust generated WASM and I am wondering whether this approach would allow Chrome Extensions to be built?

I suppose an intermediate step would be for the JS to call a WASM module for the more heavy duty stuff . .

Thanks,
Phil.

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This SO post from 2018 says it works (and there has been much improvement in WASM land since then, so it is probably even easier now to write a Chrome extension in WASM than it was five years ago). I found the WebNav extension that is open source and uses Rust and TypeScript. It was last updated in November 2022, but I guess it might still be a good place to start looking into building Chrome extensions with Rust+WASM. The Extension-with-WASM repo looks like another great project to look into and see how the basic setup works. It is a very minimal repo, so I'd recommend starting with this. But yeah, you probably have to have at least some JS glue code, though in Extension-with-WASM, it looks very much bearable.

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Thanks so much! - I will check out those links . .

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I made webnav. Let me know if you have any questions!

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@Feel-ix-343 ,

Thanks for replying!

Well my #1 priority is to see if I can create a Rust / WASM replacement for this:

which I make VERY heavy use of for Chrome, Chromium, Brave etc - this extension mostly does what I want for these browsers but I grind it to halt with the number of browsers, windows and tabs I quite frequently have open at once - after days of work this requires a log out from Sway (on Fedora Linux) back to a console to start again.

After looking at the Web_Nav page another idea occurs to me as well! Anyway, looking at Web_Nav maybe it is the interesting first step I could take to get started with Rust on an app that I have an immediate, particular interest in . . I have had a couple of attempts to get started but don't get very far and I have to get back to other, more pressing issues . .

Let me know what you think of TabFern and maybe we could have a Telegram chat?

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I built chrome extension in Rust for my product. Here is my tech-stack

  • Leptos (replacing with dioxus) => UI components
  • tailwindcss => styling
  • web-sys => general browser APIs
  • web-extensions-sys for access chrome extension APIs

I tried a few libraries for UI for reducing the WASM size. The smallest one built is <100kb. However, it becomes less important compare with DX. I end up using Leptos.
Here is github repos I referenced: GitHub - web-extensions-rs/web-extensions-sys: WebExtension API WASM bindings in Rust

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I will have a look but it seems like it will be over my head . .

Thanks!

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May I ask you why you are willing to replace Leptos? I wanted to use it for my project too but I'd be curious to hear what didn't work out for you. Sorry if I jump in the convo.

Also @philip_rhoades , did you manage to build your extension at the end? would you be willing to share some of the code? I am trying to get my way there with rust too :slight_smile:

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Both Leptos and Dioxus make the job done well for web. But Dioxus has a better future roadmap for fullstack development. Dioxus is working on Deploy.

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Ettore,