Video: Making React Work in Chrome Extensions

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We will go over the unique challenges, solutions, and down right weird things we encountered while integrating React into the Ibotta Chrome extension! Learn about optimizing content-script performance, managing state, and overcoming issues with build tools!

This talk has been presented at React Summit US 2024, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

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Video summary
We're going to talk about making React work in Chrome extensions. We started building Chrome extensions during our freshman year and have learned a lot along the way. Chrome extensions have two parts: the content script and the background script. Our story begins before React, and we created the UT Registration Plus extension to simplify class registration. We initially built the extension using HTML strings and then tried using jQuery, resulting in unmaintainable code. When building Octoshop, we chose React for its support and package system, but integrating it with Ibotta's Vue extension led to a messy codebase. We centralized our code and managed Chrome's state using React portal and hooks, improving maintainability.

FAQ

They initially used vanilla JavaScript to build Chrome extensions.

They chose React because it allowed quick UI building and had strong community support and packages.

The main topic is making React work effectively in Chrome extensions.

The speakers are Shriram Hidiyaddin and Darshan Bhatta.

They founded a company called Octoshub, which was later acquired by Ibotta.

A shadow DOM is a hidden DOM used to avoid style conflicts with the website's existing styles.

They created custom hooks to integrate Chrome's state management with React's state, improving maintainability.

Using jQuery made the code unmaintainable due to lack of unidirectional data flow and complex styling.

They installed React DevTools core and managed tab visibility to connect and disconnect from the DevTools WebSocket.

They met while studying at UT Austin.

Sriram Hariharan
Sriram Hariharan
Darshan Bhatta
Darshan Bhatta
11 min
22 Nov, 2024

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