"Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist." when doing a search

I’m opening this issue because:

• I’ll report a bug

Description

Sometimes, when using the search functionality (type “/”, type search terms, press Enter), a message in red is displayed at the bottom of the browser window: “Could not establish connection. Receiving end does not exist.”. The search functionality does not work.

Steps to Reproduce

I don’t know how to reproduce the issue systematically. It seems to occur more often on some pages. On pages where it sometimes does not work, it sometimes works also. Reloading the page does not seem to help. Opening another tab and searching for some text which is already visible in the window and then going back to the tab where the error occurred seems to help sometimes (repeating the search works at that point).

System configuration

• Operating system: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
• Firefox version: 88.0.1 (64-bit)
• Vim-Vixen version: 1.2.2

Console logs

Any relevant log in developer tools: No message when the problem occurs.

When using the workaround described above (doing a search in another tab), after going back to the tab where the search did not work, the following message is repeated a few times with different “window frame” numbers:

Failed to add shortcut on window frame 17: SecurityError: Permission denied to access property "addEventListener" on cross-origin object
shortcut.js:214:14
moz-extension://87eef6e0-d9bf-48f8-b84d-19befd6cff31/shortcut.js

I guess this message is related to vim-vixen.

[SkyLeach]

This has become the bane of my existence because it comes up all the time and when it comes up both Vim-Vixen and find+ (regex) break and quite possibly for the same reason: the missing promise.

This issue seems to have a really good explanation of the problem and solution on stackoverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41624852/messaging-problems-between-content-script-and-background-script-webextensions

And, since it’s such a PITA and waste of productivity it got me investigating it (even though I really don’t have time) and looking at the use of simple wildcards instead of real vim regex.

I wonder if it might be possible to combine the fix for this and Find+ to have real search/substitute with vim-style regex in the browser? It’s there in javascript, there is an existing extension that could be partnered with to provide it, can we please explore combining them?

Also, I really don’t think this should have been closed so quickly. It’s really not fixed.

[jakkdl]

+1 to SkyLeach, it happens to me regularly. Could this issue please be reopened?