How to catch thrown error from require using Typescript?

Question

I am trying to use optional module loading in Typescript for the webextension-polyfill-ts module.

I need to do so because I am building a library, using TypeScript, which must work on nodejs, browser and browser extension.

Unfortunately, underlying Mozilla's webextension-polyfill is throwing an error in non-WebExtension contexts.

Using TypeScript's optional loading, it throw an error, even if it should not load the module in the context.

Using try-catch block, I can't catch the error.

Here are samples:

Using optional loading

import * as Browser from "webextension-polyfill-ts";
let browser: any = false;

// eslint-disable-next-line @typescript-eslint/ban-ts-ignore
// @ts-ignore
// eslint-disable-next-line prettier/prettier
if (typeof chrome !== "undefined" && chrome.runtime && chrome.runtime.id) {
  browser = require("webextension-polyfill-ts");
} else {
  console.log("a");
}

export default browser;

Using try-catch

let browser: any = null;

try {
  browser = require("webextension-polyfill-ts");
} catch (e) {
  console.log("a");
}

export default browser;

Answer 1

I found out why it didn't work. It was bound to tinyify. Simply removing its usage with browserify fixed the issue.