Chrome extension API and idle - google-chrome

Sorry for cumbersome title, couldn't come up with more descriptive one.
The problem is when opened tab is left without user activity, for example user switched to another screen, Chrome stops rendering changes on that tab. Looks like any background activity is put on hold which is great from perspective of saving power and resources. But if user still needs to see all live updates what is the way to prevent tab to go to 'idle' state despite of having no user activity?
I was looking into chrome.idle API but it doesn't say how to prevent, only how to check.

Related

How to get Chrome context menu not grouping profiles?

How ungroup the "Open as..." context menu entry?
If I am using only 2 Profiles, I'm good
Screen of only 2 profiles
As you can see in the screenshot, I have to do two clicks for opening an url link within the other profile.
Screen of 3 or more profiles
But if I have a third profile, the context menu changes, it creates an expandable item, grouping the other profiles. That is very annoying, because I have to navigate first to the "Open as" line and then after a short delay or an additional click the profile-list appeares where I need to select appropriate profile.
Can we revert the behaviour to list all available profiles within the root context menu?
May we create a keyboard-shortcut for every profile, so pressing the asssigned button while clicking on any links, will open the url in that profile.
Or is there an extension for doing the job? I couldn find any useful information to solve this...
Thanks in advance for any helpful advices :)
(sorry for the spellingmistakes)
Offtopic:
(migrating from ff to chromium. Everyday web-based apps for end-consumers getting more focus, which means in my eyes, programmatically design gets more limited due to the main concept behind our standardized world wide web. And additionally user control gets worse everyday because that's the new key to generate money no longer just for complex & highly specialized products. e.g. timeinvestigation is enormous to through out all the bugs and bullshit extensions to get a reasonably useful tool for accessing the world wide web.)

Is there a certain page I should be fetching my API data from within my Chrome Extension Project?

I am making a chrome extension that fetched JSON data from CoinMarketCap.com API and currently I have it running in the background script. I'm not 100% sure what the purpose of the page is really. I was wondering if I could simply fetch the data from the popup script after I click a button within my popup?
Each button represents a different coin. I basically want to get the price of a chosen coin and display it on whatever page the user is on when they double click the coin in a text article. Eventually I want to make it so you can double click any coin and have it show a live price conversion while you're on the web-page.
The point of a background page is to be always available (running if persistent: true, woken up / recreated for registered events if persistent: false).
A popup's lifetime is determined by its visibility. The moment the user clicks away and closes it, the page is closed (as if the tab with it was closed), so it can no longer process any events and its state is lost.
As long as:
The data you need fetched is to be received/processed while the popup is open
Any state you need to persist between popups being shown can be stored in chrome.storage
Then you don't need the background page to do the fetching. Popup page has the same level of access to Chrome APIs.
However, consider this scenario: suppose you want the data to be ready as soon as popup is opened (at least, you want it to be fresher than "since last time"). You may want to do periodic updates even while the popup is closed to refresh the data. You can only do that reliably with a background page (and, say, chrome.alarms API). Then you can cache the latest available data in chrome.storage and use that in the popup.
Background pages have their uses as some code that can run periodically regardless of user actions, and to be able to always react to events.
According to Changes to Cross-Origin Requests in Chrome Extension Content Scripts now you have to do your fetches in Background Script. Not in Content Script.

Game show buzzer screens

I'm doing a training class right now and one of the games I plan on doing is a Jeopardy style of Q & A. The problem I'm trying to figure out is the buzzer. My idea is to use the projector as the question board I control. The trainees would go to an HTML page with nothing more than a single button. They would turn their monitors around to face me up front. As soon as I read the question they would click the button and it would change their screens the color red.
The button and background color change is easy enough, I got that. There are two problems I'm facing: 1) I need it so that they can't click the button until I'm done reading the question - this one isn't as important, I can just make up a rule. 2) Only the fastest person will have a red screen. To show me who clicked first. The others' buttons will be disabled.
I just have no idea how to even Google these two things. Like: "Disable button for other users"...? Or maybe, "only one click"...?
Any direction to search is appreciated. Eventually, I'd like to add other aspects to like the presenter could click an "incorrect button" then it would clear the screen and enable all the buttons again, for the answer steal.
You can do it with modern WebSocket or applications interact via TCP. However, WebSocket may be overkill for the simple application with a few teams. I faced the same problem before and developed a simple solution with PHP using Flock to write into a shared file on disk. Only request from one team gets the chance to write into that file. Stick to not to use WebSocket, the web page on client site does some polling to receive the "restart" signal from the server for the new question/round. It can run in LAN, different team gets different site, i.e. http://[server-ip]/team1, http://[server-ip]/team2.
You can have control over the round: allow them to press button/ restart, start a new question in http://[server-ip]/admin.
Further improvement can be made in several ways to facilitate your needs (i.e. assign team name, register team, use database instead of a flock file). The code is available here : https://github.com/minhhn2910/buzzergameshow

Google Chrome extension: background page or event page?

I'm building a Google Chrome extension at the moment and I have a question about when to use an event page.
A quick look at the Chrome extension docs shows that Google really want its developers to use event pages, if possible.
My extension currently uses a background page, but I was wondering if I should switch to an event page?
This is what my extension does:
When matched with a particular website, it injects a script that adds buttons for the user to access extra functionality.
Most of this extra functionality consists of doing fairly computationally expensive operations on user-entered data - this is all done in the background page (it is all it does).
When a user wants to run these operations on their data they press a button and this passes a message, from the injected script to the background page, which then passes a message back containing the results of its operations.
Essentially, all the background page is doing is waiting for message passing from an injected script in one particular website and then running some operations. Since it doesn't need to be active all the time, this suggests that I should be using an event page.
Can anyone confirm if this would be a good idea for me? Or are there reasons why I should stick to a background page?
Allowing the background page to suspend (chrome.runtime.onSusend) is great, because it will free up system resources. The page will automatically be launched when a matching event happens (chrome.tab.onUpdated etc). I can't think of any compelling reason to use a persistent background page. You can always store any long term state in chrome.storage.local or indexedDb, etc.

Duplicate a tab in Chrome without Reloading the Page?

Is there any way to completely duplicate the state of a current tab in Google Chrome? I want an exact copy of the current state of the page without having to reload the page in another tab.
An example use case:
While browsing a "slideshow" on a news website, I want to preserve the current slide that I'm on, but create a duplicate so that I can continue viewing the next slide. If I simply Right-Click and "Duplicate" the tab, the new page will completely Reload, reprocessing all of the Javascript and running the pre-slideshow advertisement again.
In short "NO" you can't.
I am not expert on this
but a similar behavior can be achieved in some ways i know :
Dump the whole DOM
Never tried this though. You can convert the DOM to a string, pass it to the new window and then parse it as a document. This will let you lose your DOM events and State manipulation javascript. (But that's good for your case)
var dtab = window.open('about:blank', 'duplicate_a_tab');
dtab.document.open();
dtab.document.write("... yout html string ..");
dtab.document.close();
Develop an extension
Let the users continue on the current tab with the current state, your extension should be able to capture the screenshot of that area and open that screenshot in new tab. There are plenty of screenshot taking extensions are available in the market.
If that website is your own
You can develop your services that uses state locally like progressive web apps. Give a link separately to 'duplicate' which will eventually open the same URL in different tab with the same local state and with the flag do-not-sync.
This will not work when the user uses browser inbuilt duplicate
feature.