Capture link a user clicks on a page - google-chrome

Question

I am playing around with making an extension. If a user has the extension installed, I would like to capture the link they clicked on a web page. Not quite sure how to do this, but it seems simple. I might add, I would like this to happen as long as the plugin is installed and enabled, but DON'T want the user to have to do anything in the toolbar to 'activate' it.
Not sure how to start. And I figure I have one too many JS files, but just trying to get one of them to log to the console. Neither do. My end goal is I would like to redirect them to an intranet page if they go to certain places.
background.js
var redirectedSites = ["https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=<SOMEPROFILEID>"];
// when the browser tries to get to a page, check it against a list
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(
function(details) {
console.log('is this even getting hit?');
for(var i=0; i < redirectedSites.length; ++i) {
// if the attempt is to a listed site, redirect the request
if( details.url == redirectedSites[i] )
return {redirectUrl: "http://intranet/landing?from=" + details.url };
}
},
{urls: ["*://www.facebook.com/*"]},
["blocking"]
);
manifest.json
{
"name": "Capture Click",
"version": "0.1",
"description": "Simple tool that logs clicked links.",
"permissions": [
"tabs",
"webRequest",
"webRequestBlocking",
"https://*.facebook.com/*"
],
"background": {
"scripts": ["background.js"]
},
"manifest_version": 2
}

Answer 1

I've given some advice in the comments, but the best way to solve your actual larger problem is with a webRequest handler:
var redirectedSites = ["http://www.google.com/foobar", ...];
// when the browser tries to get to a page, check it against a list
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(
function(details) {
for(var i=0; i < redirectedSites.length; ++i) {
// if the attempt is to a listed site, redirect the request
if( details.url == redirectedSites[i] )
return {redirectUrl: "http://intranet/landing?from=" + details.url };
}
},
{urls: ["*://www.google.com/*"]},
["blocking"]);
This is a really simple example, but I hope you get the idea. Here, details.url is the page the user is trying to get to, and the returned object has a redirectUrl property that redirects the attempt to visit the page. My example checks details.url against a list of target sites; you could use a regex or something else that's more robust.
Note that this will affect not only clicked links and typed-in URLs, but also resources (scrips, images) and Ajax requests.