[Difficult] Disable persistence of background script

[nareddyt]

The extension currently makes use of a persistent background page. This background script is always loaded in memory, possibly leading to extra battery usage.

We want to switch this to an event page. This only keeps the page loaded when an event (like the user visiting a new site) occurs. This could lead to minor battery savings if the user just has chrome open but isn't browsing the web.

This is a hard switch to make for two reasons:

• In memory variables cannot be used for persistent storage. That means we need to parse the json files with the data every time a site is visited, possible degrading performance. Perhaps we can make use of the Chrome storage API?
• We have to figure out how to declare an event to load the page whenever the user visits a new website.

This page has some good tips for migrating from a background page to an event page.