Home > Webmasters Resources > Chrome Extensions and NPAPI

Chrome Extensions and NPAPI

There are more details up on the Chrome wiki for how to build a Chrome extension thanks to illustrious Aaron Boodman.

You create a JSON manifest in your extension directory, tell Chrome about it via –enable-extensions –load-extension="c:myextension" (only required while extensions are in dev mode) and then you can navigate to chrome-extension://00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456/hello_world.html assuming the manifest of:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

1.
2.
      {
3.
        "format_version": 1,
4.
        "id": "00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456",
5.
        "version": "1.0",
6.
        "name": "My First Extension",
7.
        "description": "The first extension that I made."
8.
      }

Aaron’s work wouldn’t be complete with some notion of userscripts, and the document discusses that:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

1.
   2.
      {
   3.
        "format_version": 1,
   4.
        "id": "00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456",
   5.
        "version": "1.0",
   6.
        "name": "My First Extension",
   7.
        "description": "The first extension that I made.",
   8.
        "content_scripts": [
   9.
          {
  10.
            "matches": ["http://www.google.com/"],
  11.
            "js": ["foo.js"]
  12.
          }
  13.
        ]
  14.
      }
  15.

Finally, NPAPI plugins are supported for the binary side of the house, and you just need to point to the location of that code via "plugins_dir": "plugins".

There are also more resources:

    * API Pattern
    * Manifest details
    * Todo list example
    * Userscripts

Not your mothers JavaScript

chromeexp

The Chrome team has also launched a new website to showcase interesting web app examples and samples.

Calling it openwebexperiments or something, and being a bit more inclusive would have been nice (since these all seem to work fine in Safari, Firefox, etc ….. but the idea is good!

  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.
You must be logged in to post a comment.