No longer loadable in Safari 12

[LoganBarnett]

Safari 12 won't allow me to load this extension normally. I see this error when trying to install it again:

“Injector” is no longer supported. You can find newer extensions reviewed by Apple in the App Store or Safari Extensions Gallery

However I can load the extension via the Extension Builder interface and a quick test shows that it still works this way - so it makes me think maybe it just needs to be republished? When using it this way I have to manually load the extension on every Safari restart , and I lose my data when doing so.

EDIT: Right after posting this I did another quick test and my data was persisted properly, so scratch that. Using the Extension Builder to manually load the extension still applies though.

[tsbehlman]

I feel your pain. Not only do you have to recover your data but you have to reload the extension from the builder every time you relaunch Safari 😭

Here's what's happening: Apple discontinued support for developer-signed .safariextz extensions in Safari 12, as described at the bottom of the What's New in Safari 12 article. This means that outside of the extension builder the only way to install Safari extensions is via the Safari Extensions Gallery. This means the extension has to be approved and hosted by Apple.

Extension preferences are stored separately when the extension is loaded via the extension builder, so your Injections prior to Safari 12 aren't lost. If you look under ~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage/ you should have files whose names begin with "safari-extension_com.tsbehlman.injector-". Since you need to load the extension from the builder in Safari 12, your new preference files use the code "0000000000" instead of my developer ID "ve6cslgj83". You can rename or copy your old preference files to the new names.

I may try to submit Injector to Apple, but I'm not sure if they're still accepting this type of extension since Safari 13+ is slated to drop support for JavaScript-backed extensions like Injector in favor of the new, native Safari App Extension.

If Injector has a future beyond Safari 12, much of it is going to need to be rewritten 😕

I'll keep this issue open as I find time to work on readying Injector for Apple review

[LoganBarnett]

Thanks so much for looking into it!

For reloading injections, I've made some scripts that allow me to go to and from the local storage to disk in my dotfiles repo. This one writes files from disk to the local storage and this one will dump what you have currently in local storage to disk. I need to document the args for the dump script and I'll try to do that today.

EDIT: Fixed the link to point to the correct script and removed documentation comment. No need to for additional usage documentation using the correct script.