Eight edge cases developers hit when auto-saving Chrome extension data to Downloads

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Developers building TabBunker, an open-source tab manager for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, documented eight technical pitfalls encountered while implementing automatic JSON backups to the user's Downloads folder under Manifest V3. The project was motivated by Chrome's built-in behavior of wiping extension local storage upon uninstall, which can erase all saved data without warning. A key compatibility issue arose because Chrome MV3 service workers lack URL.createObjectURL, forcing the team to use data: URLs there, while Firefox rejected data: URLs and required Blob URLs instead. The team also found that using conflictAction: 'overwrite' correctly replaces files on disk but still appends entries to the browser's download history, requiring explicit history cleanup via the downloads.erase API. Tests on Chrome for Testing 153 and Firefox 155 in September 2026 confirmed that even 64 MB JSON files transferred successfully, eliminating concerns about data-size limits on the data: URL path.

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