Building Chrome Extensions: Basic Concepts and Functions

Study Notes

Extensions in Chrome are just regular HTML pages, with some extra code that tells the browser what the extension is and what it can do.
The manifest is a JSON file that tells the browser what the extension is, what code it runs, and which parts of Chrome the extension needs access to.
To use the extension in Chrome, you need to add the extension to the Chrome extensions manager, and then add a popup.html file to the extension's manifest as a browser action.
The popup.html file can contain JavaScript that makes the extension do things like change the tabs in the browser.
The icon for the extension can be any picture that has the same height and width as the icon, and Google has made a set of free icons to use.
The Chrome extension we're working on needs to be able to "talk to" Google Chrome tabs.
In order to do that, we need to use the chrome.tabs API.
The chrome.tabs API lets us get a list of all the tabs in the current window.
To get a list of all the tabs in the current window, we need to use the chrome.tabs.query API.
The chrome.tabs.query API has a function signature that looks like this:
We need to set permissions in our manifest so that the extension is able to access tab data.
Once permissions are set, we can use the chrome.tabs.query API to get a list of all the tabs in the current window.
We created a Chrome extension that sorts tabs by URL and moves them to the top bar of the browser.
We used the tabs.sort() function to arrange the tabs in alphabetical order, and the chrome.tabs.move() function to move them to the top bar.
We made sure that the first tab in the array is the leftmost tab in the top bar, and the last tab in the array is the rightmost tab.
in Commit 4.

Description

Test your understanding of Chrome extensions by learning about manifest files, adding popup.html files, using the chrome.tabs API, setting permissions, and arranging tabs using functions like tabs.sort() and chrome.tabs.move().