Tabs cannot be queried right now (user may be dragging a tab)

Question

I have a chrome extension that accesses the active tab via this code:

    chrome.tabs.query({ active: true }, (result) => { ... })

This has worked super well until a recent update, where I am no longer able to query the tab, with the following error printed in the console:

Tabs cannot be queried right now (user may be dragging a tab).

I tried this but it does not work. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I work on a fairly complex extension that does a lot of tab queries, and adding an arbitrary timeout wasn't helping, especially when users were actually dragging tabs.

Re-running the function after a short delay when we encounter browser.runtime.lastError seems to work:

function doStuffWithTabs() {
  browser.tabs.query({ active: true, currentWindow: true }, (tab) => {
    if (browser.runtime.lastError) {
      console.log('fail');
      window.setTimeout(() => doStuffWithTabs(), 100);
    } else {
      console.log('win');
    }
  });
}