Customizing Google's Chrome

Chrome

Customizing Google's Chrome

A great deal of customization can be done to a browser, using extensions, and if you know basic HTML programming then you can do it on your own for Chrome

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

BANGALOE, INDIA: Browsers serve as our primary interface to the Internet. For enhanced efficiency and to do work quickly, a browser should provide customized functionality besides basic browsing capabilities. This can be achieved in two ways, either add functionality to a browser natively or let users decide his own features using extensions. Adding lot of functionality natively to browser would obviously make browser heavy plus most of the features would not be used by all users, therefore the extension-based approach is the best among the two. At this point, Google's Chrome seems to be fast becoming popular among users, and one can In this article we talk about creating extensions and show how to create a  simple one.

Chrome extensions
The most important issue about extensions in Chrome is that they are web pages, therefore creating them is as simple as creating a web page. Extensions add UI to Chrome and can also programmatically interact with web pages or server or browser features like tabs etc. There are different types of extensions like browser actions which would add button to browser that acts like a short cut to your favorite site and also display recent information or update like Google Mail Checker that displays unread messages. Other type of extensions are Page actions that detect certain pages and prompt user to take action by clicking on the displayed icon. Content scripts, the third kind of extensions, can directly interact with web page you are visiting. It detects language of the visited page and prompts user to click on a button to translate content of a page. Now that we have a fair idea about different types of extensions, lets talk about the structure of Google Chrome extensions. Most extensions have a 'background page' which is an invisible page that holds the main logic of the extension.

Adding extensions
Chrome extension is specially packaged file (with .crx extension) that contains manifest file (most important), few HTML files, optional JavaScript and other ( like images) files. In this implementation we are use the latest version (4.0.249.89) of Chrome on a Windows machine. To start, create a folder on your machine that would contain all the required files for Chrome extension. Inside this folder create a file name 'manifest.jason'. This file contains information like files and capabilities used by extension. Here are the contents of manefest.jason we created:

{
  "name": "PCQuest Extension",
  "version": "1.0",
  "description": "The is the first extension that we made for PCQuest.",
  "browser_action": {
  "default_icon": "pcquest.png",
  "popup": "tool_pcquest.html"
}

}

We created a browser action extension that uses 'pcquest.png' and 'tool_pcquest.html' files that need to be created in the same folder. On the other hand, initial lines include name, version, and description of the extension. Here is the simple .html file we have created (tool_pcquest.html):

This is a TEST extension by PCQuest

Now that we have created the required files let's install these extensions. To do this, open Chrome browser and click on Tools icon and go to 'Extensions.' This will open the extensions page. The other way is to go to 'chrome://extensions/ ' page. On this page, click on the '+' sign in front of 'Developer mode' and then click on 'Load unpacked extension' button. Browse to the folder where you have created the extension and you are done. You can find all the loaded extensions from this page plus installation and un installation of extensions do not need a browser restart. This extension would show a 'PCQuest' logo and clicking on this logo would show a message created in 'tool_pcquest.html' page.
To package and update an extension visit 'chrome://extensions' in your browser and click on 'Pack Extension.'

The distribution of created extensions can be done by going to the extensions management page (chrome://extensions) and clicking on 'Pack Extension' button. In 'Pack Extension' window specify the path to the folder where you have created your extension, and click 'OK.' This will create two files (Chrome.crx and Chrome.pem). Here the file with '.crx' is the extension that can be installed while '.pem' file is private key. To update your extension make changes to the 'manifest.jason' file and again repeat the above steps. Specify the path to the private key and click on 'OK'. On the other hand, if you want to make your extension available on extension gallery then simply visit https://chrome.google.com/extensions and click on 'publish your extension' link. Here one needs to add ZIP file of the created extension along with information about the extension in form of screen shots or YouTube video.

©PCQuest