How to Use Transformers.js in a Chrome Extension

How to Use Transformers.js in a Chrome Extension How to Use Transformers.js in a Chrome Extension Published April 23, 2026 Update on GitHub Upvote 40 Nico Martin nico-martin We recently released a Transformers.js demo browser extension powered by Gemma 4 E2B to help users navigate the web. While building it, we ran into several practical observations about Manifest V3 runtimes, model loading, and messaging that are worth sharing.

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• How to Use Transformers.js in a Chrome Extension Published April 23, 2026 Update on GitHub Upvote 40 Nico Martin nico-martin We recently released a Transformers.js demo browser extension powered by Gemma 4 E2B to help users navigate the web.
• While building it, we ran into several practical observations about Manifest V3 runtimes, model loading, and messaging that are worth sharing.
• Who this is for This guide is for developers who want to run local AI features in a Chrome extension with Transformers.js under Manifest V3 constraints.
• By the end, you will have the same architecture used in this project: a background service worker that hosts models, a side panel chat UI, and a content script for page-level actions.
• What we will build In this guide, we will recreate the core architecture of Transformers.js Gemma 4 Browser Assistant , using the published extension as a reference and the open-source codebase as the implementation map.
• Live extension: Chrome Web Store Source code: github.com/nico-martin/gemma4-browser-extension End result: a background-hosted Transformers.js engine, a side panel chat UI, and a content script for page extraction and highlighting.