UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Create a function in an extension's background page that uses an extension API
2. Run the extension at startup (in the page's JS)
3. Run the extension manually from the developer console (After inspecting the background page)

What is the expected behavior?
The APIs should behave the same

What went wrong?
The APIs behave differently (wrong) in the developer console

WebStore page: 

Did this work before? N/A 

Chrome version: Version 64.0.3282.186 (Official Build) (64-bit)  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version: 

Here is a simple test case.

    var theUrl = "chrome://extensions";

    function test () {
        // Opens an active, foregrounded tab
        chrome.tabs.create(
            { url: theUrl, active: false, selected: false }
        );
    };

    test();

If you put that in an extension's background page it will behave correctly. If you call test() from the developer console (in the background page) it will silently ignore active/selected.

FWIW, tabs.query also acts really weird, but I can't figure out what's going on with it. It's very unpredictable to the point that I can't come up with a test case.