I would like to display the latest top 3-5 entries of my extension change log (TXT file) when it's auto-updated and ideally in a balloon-type event like the one when you have successfully installed an extension. It should show/popup near the wrench-icon area. Like a replacement for #history that GM scripts have.
There are already a few SO questions about how to get extension version like here.
There are also one here to detect if it's an install or update based on version.
It is not desktop notifications I want.
My question is how to make the balloon and populate it with the lines.
An alternative is open my options.html page in a new tab and show the change log entries there somehow. Requires tabs permission in the manifest.json file.
chrome.tabs.create({url:chrome.extension.getURL('options.html')});
Any ideas how to do this?
Or is this impossible to do?
There's neither a mechanism to create a "balloon" notification (that's reserved for native Chrome code), nor to pop out the popup without user interaction. Your automatic notification methods are fairly limited: creating a new tab with a changelog is certainly possible, but not particularly user-friendly (since it will simply open at some arbitrary time, completely remote from the user's intent).
If possible, I'd suggest waiting to notify the user until she interacts in some way with the extension. Clicking on a page-action, for instance, could have some sort of infobar-like note at the top of the popup's UI inviting the user to read more about the update.
Related
I'm building a Chrome Extension and we published the first version of it recently. We already have a group of users who installed it.
We are now trying to push an update (with bug fixes and new features), but are getting mixed messages from Chrome documentation as it pertains to the user experience for updates. They've mentioned that by default, the updated version will be pushed to the Chrome Web Store, but existing users need to restart their browser for the update to be pushed or manually do to chrome://extensions.
Is there a way to automatically push an update to a user that has already installed our Chrome Extension (without any action required by users)?
We expected the new version to be automatically updated for the existing users. However, when the new version was published, the existing users would still be on the previously version 2-3 days after (without restarting their browser)
We expected the users to automatically access the new version without any action to the browser or extension dashboard.
Normally the browser autonomously checks if there are updates every few hours. If I remember correctly every 4 hours.
Therefore it is unlikely that the browser will not receive the update if the browser has been open for several days.
However, if the extension is MV2, if there is a persistent background script and if at least one extension page is currently open in the browser then the update may be stucked until that page\tab is closed.
Once the latter is closed, the extension should receive and install the update at the next browser check.
If your extension falls into this case then you could define a handler for the runtime.onUpdateAvailable event where you force the reload of the extension.
"Is there a way to automatically push an update to a user that has already installed our Chrome Extension (without any action required by users)?"
If by "a user" you mean "some users but not all",
then you could think of a system that sends a push message from your backend and manage its reception from a service worker which will run the runtime.requestUpdateCheck method only for the desired user(s).
However, this will imply the implementation of a sort of user registration\authentication in order to recognize it at the moment of the forced update request.
Note that you will not be able to selectively allow some users to upgrade while excluding all others. Basically, with this technique you would speed up the update only for one or a part of your users, so this method (not exactly easy to implement) could be overly redundant.
Upon switching to Chrome's Manifest 3 format (and per its requirements, using a service worker if that's somehow relevant), my options page shows up like this:
Only upon moving away from the tab and reentering it, do I get my options to show up:
It doesn't matter if I trigger the options page via the toolbar or via its extensions entry.
I do have the options page in the manifest file, so I wouldn't think the change to a service worker has relevance. I don't have any listeners for the page visibility API.
Even when I blank out my options code with a minimum of content and update the unpacked extension, I still experience this behavior.
Any configuration or behaviors that could be triggering this (and how to overcome)?
It seems that whatever the cause of this behavior, that it only occurs when loading an unpacked extension. When I use web-ext to build a zip file and open that in Chrome, I don't see this problem.
Not ideal, but a bug I can at least live with.
I'm using a Chrome Extension, which I like a lot, but it shows notifications, which I find distracting. I want to disable those notifications. I'm using Linux Mint, and the notifications are shown in the panel (at the bottom of the screen).
I've checked chrome.management API, but haven't found anything related to disabling notifications. Also googling didn't provide any results.
The only way I can think of is installing the same
extension via Developer mode, creating a system script that would be watching the original Chrome Extension folder for changes, and on every change, copy the content to the Developer Mode folder (modified), modify it after each update to remove the notifications permission, and then reload the Developer Mode extension inside Chrome via a shortcut, for example.
I'm wondering if there is any simpler way to accomplish this.
I'm developing a chrome extension. When the user goes to the options page, they might modify a setting which will require them to refresh any tabs they have in which they're using the extension. So if the user changes one of these settings, then goes back to a tab which requires a refresh, I'd like to notify them of this in a non-intrusive way.
Is there a part of the API specifically for doing this sort of thing, or some other recommended way of doing it? I was thinking of maybe a little message that comes down from the top of the page, but can be closed, or a popup coming out of the browser action.
You have many options.. To name a few:
Do not require it. As much as you can, make the (presumably) content script adapt to new settings. It's by far a better UX - in some cases.
Least intrusive would probably be to update a browser action / page action icon if you use one.
Both APIs allow a per-tab change of icon/badge. You could also animate it a little to bring attention.
An in-page notification injected into the DOM. Some sort of toast or <dialog>.
Watch tab changes with chrome.tabs events, and do something on activation of affected tab, such as a chrome.notifications notification.
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.