I am developing a chrome extension. When I install it one of its icon is displayed in address bar. I want that icon should not be displayed after installation.
Starting with Chrome 49 (see the announcement and detailed description) all extension icons are displayed in the browser toolbar:
[...] each extension the user has installed has a persistent UI surface. By default, this will be in the toolbar to the right of the omnibox (where browser actions are now), and the user can choose to hide ("overflow") these actions in the Chrome menu.
The reason for this is to protect our users. We've heard too frequently that many users are unaware of the extensions they have installed, whether this is due to sideloading, installation by phishing, or simply the user forgetting how many and which are installed. Unfortunately, extensions consume computing resources, and may have significant security, privacy, and performance impacts. Because of this, we've decided we need to increase user visibility.
What this means for your extension:
If the extension has a browser action: Nothing! (Apart from the slightly different hide/overflow functionality.)
If the extension has a page action: The extension will be given a persistent icon in the toolbar. On pages where the extension's page action wouldn't normally be visible, the action will be greyed out, indicating that it doesn't want to act. On pages it does want to act, it will be fully-colored.
If the extension has no action: Similar to page actions, the extension will be given a persistent icon in the toolbar. It will be shown with the greyed-out look all the time.
Displaying the action persistently, even in the cases of a previously hidden page action or an extension with no action, is necessary because the presence of an action doesn’t always correlate with the extension acting. We also can’t show the action conditionally on, e.g., a per-tab basis, because there are many actions that are not correlated with any tab. In order to ensure users are aware of the extensions they have installed that could be affecting their browser, we need to ensure each extension is visible.
We've done our best to limit the functionality this breaks, and hope you understand the trade-off between developer inconvenience and user benefit. Thank you for understanding as we keep our users safe!
An end user of your extension may manually hide the icon either by adjusting the overall toolbar width (click the space between addressbar and toolbar and drag) or by rightclicking an icon and selecting Hide or Show:
Related
Is there a way to show/hide a chrome extension's icon based on the current tab's URL/location?
I'm writing a utility that I only want to use on certain sites, and I would like to be able to access it in one click while on those sites (i.e. not in the extension overflow menu) but hide it otherwise.
The DeclarativeContent API almost provides what I'm looking for, but it only greys out the icon, rather than hiding it entirely.
Is this possible?
Unfortunately this isn't possible (anymore). Declarative content or not, the presence of your extension's icon near the address bar is only decided by the user by pinning/unpinning it from the extension menu. In older versions of Chrome using chrome.pageAction would result in the extension icon being shown inside the address bar only for the matching websites declared in the manifest. However, things changed a while ago (actually quite some time, maybe >1y, can't recall exactly when): now all extension icons are on the right side outside the address bar and can be pinned/unpinned by the user, meaning they are either always shown or never shown. Pinned icons that use pageAction are greyed out when inactive (see this documentation page).
I'm running an application which is in the cloud on Chromium Browser on Linux (Raspberry Pi OS).
When I click on a textbox (where the text is already there) it selects the text for half of the second and then it automatically shows the context menu preventing me from modifying the content. (This also happens in Windows in Chrome).
This does not happen in the desktop app and in Firefox on Windows. I was wondering why that is? Is there a setting to change this? I noticed that behaviour works as expected if you hold the finger on the text box for 2 seconds however the single-finger touch just highlights and shows the context menu which is not practical.
I would essentially want to swap this the other way around; touch and hold to simulate right click and click to select.
This only happens in Chrome. I do not have much control of the cloud application therefore I was wondering if there is any particular setting in Chrome which controls this behaviour. I tried changing the system settings on windows. I went to chrome://flags and disabled the following:
Omnibox rich entity suggestions; Send tab to self omnibox sending animation; Touch UI layout;
Touch initiated drag and drop; Enable experimental fling animation; Enable resampling input events;
Context menus show full URLs; Show autofill predictions;
Omnibox preserve default match against async update; Experimental system keyboard lock;
Omnibox on device head suggestions; Select HW overlay strategies; WebUI tab strip;
Select which UI to use for translate bubble; WebUI tab strip demo options; Scrollable TabStrip;
Omnibox on-focus suggestions; Substring matching for autofill suggestions;
Omnibox local entity suggestions; Omnibox Zero Suggestions on SERP / On-Focus Query Refinement;
Omnibox Experimental Keyword Mode; Filtering scroll predictions; Focus mode;
Zero-copy rasterizer; Omnibox Experimental Suggest Scoring;
Enable Probing on Navigation Predictor Isolated Prerenders; Hardware Media Key Handling;
Media Session Service; Audio Focus Enforcement;
I also went into the developer settings to see if there is anything in there but was unsuccessful.
I also tried the google extension to block right-click behaviour however it did not work.
I would like to go back to developers of the cloud app and ask them to correct this but the only question is why it works on other browsers.
I tried other browsers on Raspberry Pi but they nowhere near the performance of chromium.
So using the Google Chrome Top Sites api has values for the url and the title, but when you load the default google chrome page it also has an image of those sites, is there any way to get that sort of image for an extension? If not how does google get that image and how can you get an image of the the user's top viewed website?
Since that it isn't possible to get a screenshot of a page without loading it inside a tab, Chrome is simply getting those screenshots while you're browsing your favourite sites. You can tell this easily because sometimes sites and images do not coincide (e.g. sometimes my facebook.com top site has the image of my profile page, but links to the home).
Then, if you want your screenshots of the Top Sites, you'll have to start without screenshots, and create them while the user browses the web by using the chrome.tabs API to check when a tab loads one of the Top Sites (listening to the event onUpdated), and get a screenshot of that tab using captureVisibleTab.
NOTES: make sure that you've requested the permission for "<all_urls>" in your manifest, which is required for captureVisibleTab to work. Additionally, you may find this question and its answer helpful.
It's unfortunately not possible*. Chrome stores those thumbnails internally in URIs not accessible from an extension.
There is an existing feature request: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11854
If you look at the comments, one of the main use cases is to access site thumbnails to replicate the New Tab page.
Do star the feature request above to raise its priority if you want this functionality implemented.
* By that I mean that it's not possilbe to access Chrome's own internal store of thumbnails.
Furthermore, as Marco suggested the way to replicate that would be tab capture, but you can't do it "in the background" for privacy reasons - a user must make an explicit gesture (e.g. click the extension's button, press a shortcut, etc.) to perform capture.
Marco's answer is valid now, captureVisibleTab should be accessible upon events. But yes, as of now Chrome forces you to have very broad permissions and maintaining your own thumbnail store.
I am building an extension for Chrome and Can't decide If I should use chrome.windows.create type popup , panel or detached panel. I could not find a comparative study of the three options . Any links or short description of positives and limitations of each will be helpful .
Thanks
You are having difficulty understanding it, because unless you specifically enabled an experimental feature, they are exactly the same, or rather the latter ones are ignored and a popup type is created.
Unfortunately, this means that this API is unavailable for general use until Google decides to mark it stable.
Quoting the docs:
The 'panel' and 'detached_panel' types create a popup unless the '--enable-panels' flag is set.
As for what panels are, here is the API proposal with detailed description.
Panels are windows that are visible to the user even while the user is interacting with other applications. The small windows are positioned at the bottom of the screen, with minimal manual window management by the user. This API will allow extension developers to create and use panels.
[...]
An extension opens small "pop up" windows, for example, separate chat sessions, calculator, media player, stock/sport/news ticker, task list, scratchpad, that the user wants to keep visible while using a different application or browsing a different web site. Scattered "pop up" windows are difficult for the user to keep track of, therefore panels are placed along the bottom of the screen and are "always on top".
The user would like easy control of chat windows: finding them, moving them out of the way, etc. Window management of separate chat "pop ups" is time consuming. All panels can be minimized/maximized together.
If you want a real-life example, the Hangouts extension is whitelisted to use this window type; that's how they make the chat panels:
Since chrome doesn't by default enable panels , this need to be set to display panel behavior instead of popup window . Note that popup windows can be re positioned and one can view console window , but none of it is available in panel .
I'm looking to build a chrome extension that allows the user to have an independent subwindow that is the same in each tab (for example you are taking notes and the notes are synchronized among each tab). Also, clicking a link should not destroy this subwindow.
One solution is to inject an iframe in each tab, and try to synchronize this data serverside and send back to each client tab, as it is updated.
This seems very tedious, plus the iframe would be provided by a third party, and I want to make it the easiest for them.
Is there a way I can have a shared dom piece and display it in its current state across several tabs?
There's an API (still experimental as of Chrome 17) that does more or less exactly what you want. If you visit about:flags, and enable "Panels" (they're enabled by default in Dev and on Canary (and on ChromeOS)), you'll be able to use chrome.windows.create with a type of panel to create a floating pane that exists independently from the browser window. That would likely meet your need.
Take a look at the Google Talk extension for an example of how it might work.