Browser extension resources

This post is not a migration guide. Google has published one here . The goal is to raise awareness among extension owners. The idea is to understand the impacts and the efforts required. Are you concerned ?  Well, as of Jan 2022, you can't post a manifest v2 based extension on the Chrome Web Store (CWS) and by end of 2022, all extensions should have been migrated. Official Google timeline is here . So the question is more about the severity of changes you need to bring in and when you need to start the efforts. This depends on: - the complexity of your addon, its architecture and the balance of responsibilities between content and background scripts - the amount of chrome APIs deprecated in V3 - the usage of chrome APIs that are not available or not ready yet in V3. - the usage of DOM based APIs  Note: you can still distribute V2 extensions till June 2023 if you don't host your extension on CWS and force deployment thru Google Enterprise policy. Service workers Architecture is...

Registering and updating chrome extensions  on the Chrome Web Store has become quite a headache since June 2018. Causes for rejection have obviously evolved in the past year and  Google people are far from eager to provide the changes, this on purpose. Even worse some of the existing extensions get ousted  from the store with obscure reasons, leaving thousands of users in the dark. Without betraying much of the secrets here is a list of questions you should consider before submitting a new package based on my experience: A/ My extension is installed since years, undergone tens of upgrades and suddenly gets rejected ?? answer: review rules have changed, it has nothing to do with the little or big changes you have brought with the new version. Stop scratching your head and audit your addon based on the new rules. B/ Got the rejection message “Spam and Placement in the Store” answer:  there are a few reasons for that and you should review: in your manifest ...

I'm particularly interested in code coverage assessment in two situations: - who has never refactored a functional extension to cope for growth and new features ? When I refactor, I do variable renaming, object restructuring, code cleaning etc .., and I become very concerned about regression issues. Changes can be spread,major and devastating. So, I need to validate 100% of them. - having deployed tens of extensions, I very often start new projects from existing ones and carry over code I may not need at the end. Code coverage highlights very quickly candidate files and lines to prune off. Since 59, chrome offers a very interesting code coverage feature available thru the devtools - of course -.  Content script and background scripts (in fact all scripts!) can be studied for coverage. So open the devtools, open the console and click the "coverage" tab: - a "content scripts" checkbox next to the URL filter allows to include content scripts in the cove...

Here is a little JS snippet which prevents every file download  (and accessorily opens a new tab in Gsuite for attempts to download from the Gsuite):   chrome.downloads.onCreated.addListener(downloadItem => {       chrome.downloads.cancel( downloadItem.id, ()=>{         alert("DL canceled: "+downloadItem.finalUrl);         if (downloadItem.finalUrl.search("https://docs.google.com")!=-1){           var _driveUrl = downloadItem.finalUrl.replace(/export\?.*/,"");           chrome.tabs.create({url:_driveUrl}, ()=>{});         }       })   });

Let me be lazy today and relay some good work made by a Moscow based SW developer named Vitaly Gordon. That fellow has published an autorefresh javascript snippet which improves extension development productivity by a signifcant factor. In dev mode, edit and save one of your build files and your browser will automatically reload the extension and the current active tab ... neat! Comparing to other solutions I've found on the net, this one is very elegant since it does not require any change to your build process, just inclusion of a snippet in your manifest. Code can be found on git. Thanks Vitaly!