[webdev] Add a flag to launch chrome signed into the default profile and enable extensions

[annagrin]

Currently webdev launches chrome using temp profile, so the users cannot use their extensions while debugging. Can we allow launching a window that is signed in as the user's default profile?

Notes:

There seems to be a bug/feature in chrome that only uses the existing session with --user-data-dir. The existing session cannot open a debug port that dwds needs.

Workaround: copy the default profile to a temp directory, and pass it to chrome. That seems to work, but takes time to copy the profile.

[alanknight-wk]

Nice! It would help with the launch time if webdev could re-use the previous temporary profile, rather than launching a new one each time. You'd need to be able to force a new profile in order to get updates from the previous one. Or even if if started from a completely empty profile, users could install their extensions once and keep using it.

I'm also not sure how that works with authorization schemes. In the past I've run things in a persistent temporary profile but I wasn't able to have it authorized properly to the company web app, and the thing I wanted to debug needed to do that. But that may just be because I didn't understand how to do that properly.

[annagrin]

Hi Alan! Nice to hear from you!

As for not reusing the new directory - we only do that on windows due to some flakiness that reusing the directory on windows results in. Would you be able to open a new issue for that? You can also try modifying webdev code here to try things out on your machine (commenting out the !Platform.isWindows condition):

webdev/webdev/lib/src/serve/chrome.dart

Line 45 in 4655961

if (!Platform.isWindows) {

For the issue at hand, I can add a flag for passing a user directory so you can pass the original chrome user directory, but for now only for non-windows platforms - we would need to solve the flakiness issue first.