could someone help me with finding a place (URL, RSS feed or something else) where I could find what changes will be done in chrome extension API in each new Chrome release. It will be very useful to have that information before release to prepare extension.
Thanks!
This should be the 'source of true' for Chrome extensions (APIs and other important topics around it) - http://blog.chromium.org/search/label/extensions
Related
Background
I've been using the crx-hotreload package to auto-reload my chrome extensions during development because it's annoying to have to click the refresh button on the Extensions page every time you make a change; however, this package doesn't work with MV3 because it uses the chrome.runtime.getPackageDirectoryEntry method, which seems to have been removed from chrome.runtime in MV3. I can't find documentation to confirm that it was removed, but it's not there when I try to use it.
Questions
Does anyone know how to get access to all the files in the extension directory in Chrome Extension Manifest Version 3?
Or generally, is there a better way that I can hot-reload my chrome extensions during development that would work for MV3?
This is one of many things based on DOM capabilities of background pages that are removed from ManifestV3 because service workers don't have DOM. For example, getPackageDirectoryEntry is using the old nonstandard FileSystem API in its returned value.
As to why, apparently the switch to service workers simplifies the internal source code in Chromium, even if it doesn't provide any real improvements for extension authors or users.
At this point all you can do is present a convincing use case and ask Chromium developers via https://crbug.com to implement an alternative API.
Everybody can download chrome extension, edit and reupload, how i can protect my chrome extension and what i need to do if i see someone reupload my chrome extension?
You can't bulletproof-protect it. The only thing you can reasonably guarantee to be unique is the extension ID for published items - but any checks you would do against it can be circumvented.
It's not a technical problem. It's a social/legal problem.
If you see someone doing it, you should use the Report Abuse function of the Web Store.
What other does is to load the "actual" code of their extension remotely (via CDN)
The code that is packaged with chrome extension just act as loader or their "real" extension code.
See Streak's InboxSDK (sdk to build chrome extensions for gmail). It uses the same concept. https://www.inboxsdk.com/docs/
Our Chrome Extension was removed from the Google Chrome store (and Google Marketplace) and we didn't get any notification before hand that it was going to be removed, and didn't get notified that it was removed (or for what reason).
Our extension is FollowUp.cc (a growing company that depends on the extension)
One of our engineers started reverting changes and republished an older version of the extension in hopes that that may help. We're out of ideas.
Any help would be appreciated!
In the Chrome extensions documentation page for manifest.json, there is an undocumented setting called input_components. What does it do?
input_components is part of the (terribly documented) chrome.input.ime API.
If you want to know how it works, see this example and/or read Chromium's source code.
I'm looking to offer the user (inside my Chrome Extension) the option to change their Omnibox default search engine.
Sadly, I've been unable to find any documentation on how to do something like this. Has anyone does this before successfully?
Actually with new versions of chrome it's possible through chrome API via settings_override section. But for now it's working only on windows.
Not possible, sadly. See this bug filed in Chromium