What if, and hear me out, all that effort went into MV2?
There's a better question: what if instead of investing huge amount of times into DNR they put it somewhere else? For instance, into providing better tools for extensions to persist their state so that we didn't have to rewrite the extensions from scratch to make them work with the new service workers model? I think it would've been much much much better. Unfortunately, that's how hindsight works.
Yeah, at first I thought of using offscreen documents as a replacement, but it appears that:
1. They're not persistent too.
2. They have a different purpose, they're supposed to be used as a temporary crutch that gives access to DOM features for the time until it's brought to service workers.
> persistent service workers
You're right to write it in cursive, there're ways to prolong the lifetime of a service worker, but they're not persistent anyways. All in all, the only reliable way to live with service worker is to rewrite extensions in a way that allows them to very quickly initialize after the service worker is brought back to life. For some extensions it's easy, for some it's quite a complicated task.
edit: formatting