Access Number of Users in a chrome extension HTML - html

I have a chrome extension, and I am creating a website for it, that has info, and a way to test it. I would like to show the number of users currently, but have found no way to do this. It doesn't have to update every day, but if it updated weekly that would be great!
Also- I don't care if it is by a outside company rather than chrome itself. all that matters is that it works.

I am planning to show something similar on my extension's site so I have googled around a bit recently. I found a repo (https://github.com/petasittek/chrome-web-store-stats) that parses information about extensions in the Chrome Web Store. It could be useful for you. I think I will end up just parsing the Webstore page for the user numbers everyday in save it to a database. My extension is also available for Firefox and I will do the same there then aggregate the results.

Related

Publishing will be delayed Broad host permissions error Chrome web store

We're trying to work out how to resolve this issue, the current issue we have is our extension works on a unlimited amount of websites 1 of the features is a time & screenshot monitor so employer can track freelancers work other feature is ability to highlight text on any site and run a amazon search for the highlighted text for example.
We are always updating and any issues got fixed within 24-48 hours now with this happening every time we have to wait 1-3 weeks for a review according to google devs.
If we change the manifest to specific websites only then 99% of the time our extensions not going to work on all the other sites not listed. Can we do something else?
IF ANYONE HAS A SOLUTION OF WHAT WE CAN CHANGE TO MAKE THIS WORK I'M ALL EARS!

Can chrome be used, from the command-line, to retrieve a URL's content to a file?

I've been driving myself mad trying to get curl, wget, the python request module, and others, to simply get me logged in to a website and pull page text there. I can certainly request HTML from the site, but only as an anonymous user. I've spent a few hours with tricks like chrome's "copy cURL" feature, but the website in question is smart enough to defend against login playbacks.
All I want is a way, from the command-line, to do something like:
chrome.exe --output_to_file page.html https://www.endpoint.com/auth_access_only.html
Essentially, I'm looking for chrome to do for me what cURL does, but I want the command-line invocation to be executed as me. I can see how this might open a potential security issue, but I don't mind at all if I have to do something magical to authorize my script. I'm not looking to do anything evil - I just want to be able to write scripts that are as "me" as I am.
I guess that, if it's truly unavoidable, I could suck it up and dust off Internet Explorer. I'd really rather not do that. I'd feel so dirty.
This is possible, but it's not as simple as you're thinking.
You can use the Chrome Debugging Protocol to remote-control Chrome.
You will need to write some code to make this work - I have done similar tasks using the chrome-remote-interface library for Node.js.
Make sure you understand what a browser profile is and where your profile folder lives.
If Chrome is already running using your browser profile: make sure it was launched with --remote-debugging-port=9002 or similar.
If Chrome is not already running using your browser profile: launch it with --user-data-dir="C:\path\to\your\profile" --remote-debugging-port=9002 or similar.
The "running or not" part is a bit tricky - you cannot launch more than one Chrome instance with the same browser profile, but you need to use this user profile because your login data is stored there. It may actually be easiest to create a separate browser profile that is just used for this automated task, and log in to the site there too.
Then, at a high level, your Node.js code will need to connect to Chrome, load the page, wait for the response, and save it to a file. Have a look at the example code for the chrome-remote-interface library - you can definitely piece together what you need from there.
Another option which uses the same underlying technology is to use puppeteer which is another tool to automate Chrome. It is designed to start from a fresh profile every time. If you do this, you'll need to script more interactions:
Visit the site's login page
Type the login credentials into the form and click the login button
Visit the site's authenticated page and save it to a file.
The benefit of this approach is that the result should be more reliable, preventing issues like expired login sessions.

Access all new Chrome Notifications programmatically

I have no previous experience with programming Google Chrome plugins which is why I am starting here to see if what I want to accomplish is possible/reasonable. I do however have a pretty broad experience in programming in general.
What I want:
I want some kind of "trigger" to go off when a new Chrome Notification (you know these little pop ups above the system tray) is popping up. I want to execute some script/code depending on what information the notification contains so that I for example could have an alarm go off if I receive an email from a certain user with a certain key word in the subject and get a pop up from my Gmail Notifier extension.
This is however just an example and I have a bunch of ideas for different notifications from different extensions and websites so don't get caught up on that particular example.
When I look at the Chrome Notification API I see that there is a getAll method that supposedly is getting all the "notifications in the system" but I do not find any Event for new notifications.
I suppose a possibility would be to poll with getAll a couple of times per second (it needs to be really fast for some implementations I have in mind) but it feels very tacky.
Is there any way to easily access new Notifications programmatically in Chrome?
(I'm open to all solutions, programming languages and such...)
Well, I searched long and hard and got involved with the Chromium dev group and asked around there. As far as I could figure out there was no reasonable way of accessing all Notifications programatically.
So what I ended up doing was just download the source-code of Chromium and build my own custom version of chromium adding a very crude API. Worked like a charm and not as complicated as one might think.
Cheers!

Edit review on chrome webstore as developer

Suppose I'm the developer of a chrome extension (which indeed I am) that is up on the web store and that I want to answer the review of one the users.
Now, if I add/edit my review my previous post gets overridden (even if I AM the developer), making my efforts in helping users useless.
Is there something I'm missing, or is it how it currently works without any way to prevent this from happening?
All reviews on the Chrome Web Store are from Google+ users now. Your best option is to click through to their profile and either send them an email, send them a message, or share a post with them. The first two are more direct and likely to get noticed but there isn't much else you can do.

How do I track users and installations on the Chrome Web Store?

I developed a Chrome extension called TabCarousel to help monitor information like our NewRelic graphs. After realizing other people might find it useful, I decided to open source it and then release it on the Chrome Web Store.
I'm really impressed with how easy it is to release code on the Web Store, but... even a couple days after the extension has been released, I still show " users" and " weekly installs" rather than something like "7 users" and "10 weekly installs". I know I've set my extension up on a few computers, and I've helped others set it up as well. A few friends have installed it too.
Why doesn't the Chrome Web Store show any users or installations? It's not showing any data at all -- that is, " users" instead of "0 users".
Am I just missing something? I've read through the FAQ, some blog posts, and even set up a Google Analytics account and entered it in the Developer Dashboard entry for my extension. I just want to get an idea of how many downloads I'm getting so I can gauge interest like I can on other projects.
This is actually a bug, and the team are in the process of preparing a fix and getting it pushed live. I don't have an exact ETA, but it should be pretty soon.
On another note, you can still use your Google Analytics accounts to detect traffic to your landing page and in your app. And if you look for the referrer chrome://newtab you will get a very good indication of all the users who are launching your app.
Just give it few days, they don't update counters in WebStore too often. Currently it doesn't show users for any extension submitted after June 15, and yours was submitted on June 19.