I've 4 monitors connected to a pc running CentOS 7. Each physical monitor/display should show a website in full screen and auto refresh it every x seconds.
I've tried:
opening from bash and moving with xdotool -> how can I distinguish between the 4 chrome or firefox windows? If I don't do it and apply to the last active this might become unreliable with other programs open.
researched devilspie, seems it has the same problem (can't distinguish between multiple chrome/firefox windows)
using DISPLAY variable -> does only find one display 0.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/monitor-master/ -> does not work with extended workspace, contacted developer
I've only a xrandr bash script to rearrange the displays when they become connected (three of four may be switched off to save power).
I would use a firefox/chrome add on for the auto refresh functionality.
Maybe someone can give me a hint how to reliably do this?
In addition to the "easy auto refresh" chrome plugin. I have another idea for you, why not use a chrome extension for handling the positioning.
It is of course, only for chrome(maybe thats fine for you).
Background: We had related difficulties. Internal webapp that opens multiple documents in windows, and need to be placed in other monitors.
The javascript does not support this, for security reasons and only a native extension can properly work with the tabs/windows objects.
Therefore, we have created an open source chrome extension for doing exactly that: flexible windows position across multi-monitor setups.
In your case you can define for each monitor a website-rule that the window would appear there.
The chrome extension is called "MultiWindow Positioner" and its complete free. You can get it at the chrome store here
The actual source code you find in github in the project chrome-multiwindow-positioner
Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of the open source (MIT) github project. If there any interesting idea, or comments feel free to share them here.
Related
Edit: Thank you wOxxOm. It worked :)
chrome.tabs.move(XXX,{windowId:YYY, index:ZZZ})
Somehow I did not see the move option :(
I am writing simple Google Chrome web extension and I want to manipulate the tabs and windows. I actually want to be able to move a tab between the windows. The tab will have programatically spawned dynamic page, that I do not want to reload. The windowId is not listed in the modifiable properties chrome.tabs.
Am I missing something or it is currently not supported? What are the workarounds?
p.s. In extreme case also powershell or .Net might be acceptable (I have total control of the target PC). Currently spawning clearly distinguishable iframe over the web pages (background script injected and message listener) but the iframe gets reloaded, which I want to avoid.
p.p.s. Workaround might be to detect the currently active window and spawn new tab in the active window (if required), but this would require to save the page state, close the inactive tab and spown new one in the active window (this should be possible)
p.p.p.s. Main target is Google Chrome, but want it also for Microsoft Edge. Hopefully also for other browsers.
Edit: Thank you wOxxOm. It worked :)
chrome.tabs.move(XXX,{windowId:YYY, index:ZZZ})
Somehow I did not see the move option :(
In Chrome for Win/Mac/Linux it is possible to have browser addon scripts running before the user launches the browser and after they shut the last browser window. In Chrome this is done by claiming the background permission - see the Chrome extensions API docs on background. Other browsers don't seem to support this permission. So my questions:
Is this also possible with other browsers (e.g. by using some other permission/API...) and with other operating systems (specifically Android/iOS)?
What is the behavior of this feature across different operating systems? (I have tried it with Chrome on Ubuntu and while Chrome does continue running and the script keeps performing its task, it doesn't automatically start in background after restarting the OS - I guess one would have to manually add an autostart script for that)
What I'm trying to accomplish is something similar as to what as been asked here: Display a Chrome desktop notification every day at specific time. But I want to learn about cross-browser-and-OS-compatibility before putting too much effort into it. Also an outlook for what's going to be possible in the near future would be nice. :)
(I am aware that something like this could be done using push notifications, but I would also like my app to work offline, so that's not an option.)
I'm diving into the world of Chrome Extension development, primarily because there is a very small feature that is missing in Chrome that I miss dearly. The context-menu option to "Set as background/wallpaper" like that found in Firefox. Sounds trivial, but it's convenient.
I have most of the "basic" stuff worked out with the manifest file, am able to install it, even managed to get it to show up as a context menu item.
The problem obviously is that I am wanting to mess with a user's OS-level settings which is extremely difficult because of security issues (fully understand this).
I found an extension that allowed this in older versions of Chrome, and it looked like the developer used some type of .dll and C++ to accomplish this.
I'm not really sure how to make this work.
Since that Chrome doesn't allow these kind of manipulations (such as your PC's settings), you will need to create a native application that will run beside your extension. When the user chooses the image from your extension and selects "use as wallpaper", you will use the native messaging API to send a message to your desktop application, that will set the wallpaper (and do whatever else you can't do within a chrome extension) for you.
You can use the chrome.wallpaper app api to set the wallpaper after using the messaging api to send the image from your extension.
I am developing a responsive website. For each and every change I made in javascript, css & html file, I need to test it in all possible screen size in portrait and landscape mode. Normally we used to test it in 3 to 5 different browser window size, and in portrait & landscape. I felt changing screensize and orientation again and again is a tedious job. So planned to write a tool, which will open multiple browser windows in a different screen size with the given url loaded in it. Any idea, or advice how to start this?
PS. If you are voting for deleting this question, please consider commenting with some suggestion how I can start, or is there any free tool available for this.
Thanks in advance.
There are number of great tools and services for helping test a website in just about every possible OS/browser/size these days.
BrowserStack.com allows you to pull up your website on nearly every combination of OS/browser/size and use the site to see how elements and features perform. There are other many other services that do this.
Another option would be a browser extension/plugin like Chrome's Window Resizer. It allows you to quickly toggle between common (and custom) window sizes. This is the most manual of the three options here, and the only free option.
One final option is Adobe's Edge Inspect. This app allows you to connect several devices to your computer and simultaneously browse a site across each of the devices. It also allows you to remote inspection on each of the connected devices.
Tools like Selenium can drive browsers and resize them as needed. Depending on the language of your choice, google for something like: selenium resize browser (language of your choice)
When launching the Chrome Extension Google-Hangouts, a panel initially appears that lists members and a link/button to create a new Hangout.
This panel is initially pinned to the bottom right of the browser window. When pinned like this, it remains always on top as a browser navigation session continues: users can go to different URLs, change tabs, etc. and that panel stays at the bottom right and stays on top of all other windows (or at least on top of the main browser window).
Once it's unpinned, you can drag it around the window, but it no longer stays always on top.
My question is, how was that achieved - what code, or what functions, do i need to call to create that window/panel so that it stays initially pinned and always on top? Is there some binding to some native code that's involved? Some other approach?
If anyone know and can show or explain, i would be hugely grateful as this feature is key to an extension i'm trying to build.
Thanks a lot!
This may not be an answer but to get a clue of what is happening I extracted the crx file to view its content there are a few OS specific files : ace.dll , libace.so and ace. After researching a bit i found this. This is a plugin. Hangouts extension is using ace plugin which is actually running on your desktop(i'm not sure about this). You can check this article
I found this related post: How to build an chrome extension like Google Hangouts
ACE is actually not what makes the window, Chrome has that capability built in, apparently. Even if you don't enable panels, extensions from Google can still make them, provided your OS is capable.