Show page_action icon always

Question

I'm brand new to Chrome extensions, but I wanted to start messing around with them for the fun of it. I know that it is against convention to always display a page_action icon, however for the purpose of learning I'd like to display it for every tab.

I've been doing reading and I'm having a hard time figuring out what's deprecated and what's not. The docs don't seem to note that some methods are deprecated.

Here's what I have so far -- it's been a while since I've messed with Javascript so bear with me; this is all very simple stuff.

So what would be the easiest way to always show a page_action icon? Am I even close to the right track? Thanks.

---

manifest.json

{
"manifest_version" : 2,

"name": "Hello World",
"version": "0.1",
"description": "Hello World",

"page_action": {
    "default_icon": "images/blackWhite.jpg", 
    "default_title": "HW!"
  },

"background": {
    "scripts": ["scripts/background.js"]
 }
}

---

background.js

chrome.tabs.getSelected(null, function(tab {
  var id = tab.id
  chrome.pageAction.show(id)
}))

Answer 1

Your code would execute only once, while it should execute on every tab update.

One approach to do so is to listen to chrome.tabs.onUpdated , as done in a sample extension .

chrome.tabs.onUpdated.addListener(function(tabId, change, tab) {
  if (change.status == "complete") {
    chrome.pageAction.show(tabId);
  }
});

This will make the page action appear when the page finishes loading.

If you want it to appear sooner, you can, for instance, listen to onUpdated , onCreated and onReplaced without filters (you don't care if you call show() several times).

Edit: Actually, another good combination is onUpdated (to detect URL change) and onActivated (to detect tab change).

Or, you can employ a content script that loads in all pages at document_start and messages the background to show the page action.