I came to know that crossrider.com is helping us to develop extension for different browsers, while keeping the same code.
I have two questions
Question 1:
After going through docs and libraries in crossrider, I still wonder how to get the active tab url.
Question 2:
I also need to open a popup after clicking toolbar icon, similar to google chrome extension.
I came across crossrider siderbar plugin. But, I am unable to change the url for sidebar dynamically.
Do we have any other crossrider plugins which opens like an popup ?
Answer Q1: You can use our appAPI.tabs.onTabSelectionChanged(function callback([{tabId, tabUrl}])) method (soon to be documented). To keep track of the ActiveTab URL, in the callback, simply set a global variable to the callback's optional tabUrl parameter. This is currently supported in Chrome and Firefox.
Answer Q2: I'm afraid that currently there isn't a native popup plugin (your welcome to write one and submit it for consideration ;-)). However, you can configure and use jQueryUI popups from within the extension.
I need to get active tab url in IE.
If it is not possible using jquery in IE, can we use messaging api to send messages from pages to background scope, and store the active tab url in background's global variable?
Related
I'm working on an extension that's supposed to use the content of the page to determine whether to show an interface to the user.
The ways to show an interface, if I'm correct, are using a browser action or a page action.
And neither can be triggered programmatically. But content scripts could be written to inject an equivalent GUI into the webpage.
So, does it make sense to modify the DOM using content-scripts to display an interface as a substitute for page action? It seems like an obvious work around to me, and I'm sure there are good reasons to not let page actions be triggered programmatically.
Well, modifying DOM must be done by only Content Scripts, as that is the reason they exist.
Want to fetch any data from current page, alter anything in the page, add new UI in the page - whatever, content script will help you do that.
It has nothing to do with Page script Or Browser Script.
YES, you can not programatically trigger page/browser action. It has to be done by explicit clicking.
But if you want to open a UI by clicking a chrome extension, then there is a popup js for that.
How can a Chrome extension alter the Google Calendar event editing UI?
I see that, for example, the Moxtra extension has managed to inject UI including a button just below the location. According to their YouTube video they added a button to fill out the event description although when I installed Moxtra this no longer seems to work.
Stepping back from this a bit, it occurs to me that editing the Google Calendar page seems like something that could easily get messed up by future changes to Google Calendar. Perhaps it is better to edit the event description from the extension's own UI? If so, how can that be done?
Thanks.
It can be done with content scripts and modification of the DOM.
They probably check Event edit page for specific selectors and try to insert their own elements in the page, if they found it.
So, if UI of Google Calendar will change, extensions like Moxtra will be probably also broken.
You are right about the edit of the description - it's safer. But you still need to get a description field and change a content of it. There is no 100% safe way to do it and don't break on the change of UI.
When an extension is installed in chrome, a popup comes up which says [Extension_name] has been added to chrome.
This is the default popup having extension icon and some message. I want to modify this popup data. is there any api which we can use to modify it.
There is no such API, but you can use onInstalled event to open new tab with your own description.
In addition to Deliaz's answer, you can create either a browser action or a page action popup. You can change popup html dynamically to make it look completely different depending on the situation but you can't open it programmatically (desktop notifications could be used for alerts).
Here's another reference which might also help.
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.
How can I make a Chrome extensions that is not a popup or a button?
I wanna have a script running whenever the window is opened and iterate thru all its tabs performing actions on each tab.
I also need (is this possible?) want to add to the same extension buttons (+keyboard shortcuts?) that when clicked, perform actions on all tabs.
Then I need control on these buttons visibility, and make them visible only in certain conditions (e.g. show only when page is loading, hide when not-loading).
Where do I put my script and how do I refer to it in my *.json manifest?
Any info/links will be appreciated.
The answers to 0 and 1 can directly be found in the documentation, specifically background pages, chrome.windows API and chrome.tabs API.
To bind global events, use the chrome.experimental.keybinding API. Because this API is experimental, you have to enable it first at chrome://flags. Also, the extension cannot be uploaded to the Chrome Web store.
If you want to add an "extension button" which performs some action on click, define a browser action and bind an event listener to chrome.browserAction.onClicked.
To select all tabs, use chrome.tabs.query({}, callback) method ({} means no filter, so all tabs are selected).
Browser action buttons are always visible. If you want to create a button which is not always visible, use a page action instead. The chrome.tabs module includes several events which can be used to find out whether your conditions are met.
As for putting up the script and the manifest file, read the documentation on Manifest files and explore some examples.