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One of the best things that ever happened to the user experience of the web has been web extensions. Browsers are powerful but extensions bring a new level of functionality. Whether it’s crypto wallets, media players, or other popular plugins, web extensions have become essential to everyday tasks.
Working on MetaMask, I am thrust into a world of making everything Ethereum-centric work. One of those functionalities is ensuring that .eth domains resolve to ENS when input to the address bar. Requests to https://vitalik.eth naturally fail, since .eth isn’t a natively supported top-level domain, so we need to intercept this errant request.
Web extensions provide a browser.webRequest.onErrorOccurred method that developers can plug into to listen for errant requests. This API does not catch 4xx and 5xx response errors. In the case above, we look for .eth hostnames and redirect to ENS.
You could employ onErrorOccurred for any number of reasons, but detecting custom hostnames is a great one!
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