Chrome loading extension when opened vs I reloading manually an extension

Question

I wanna clear my history and cache automatically only when I open my browser, but not when I reload the extension from chrome://extensions. How do I do it? I'm talking about Chrome JavaScript API. I use the latest version of Google Chrome, on Ubuntu 16.04.

LE: I made an extension that among many things clears my history and cache. In manifest.json, I have:

"background": {"scripts": ["SessionManager.js"],"persistent":true},

In SessionManager.js, I have:

function init(){
    setTimeout(clean,1);
}
function clean(){
    chrome.browsingData.remove({},{'appcache':true,'cache':true,'cookies':true,'downloads':true,'fileSystems':true,'formData':true,'history':true,'indexedDB':true,'localStorage':true,'serverBoundCertificates':true,'passwords':true,'pluginData':true,'serviceWorkers':true,'webSQL':true});
}

init();

Answer 1

You need the chrome.runtime.onStartup event .

When you update / manually reload an extension, its onInstalled event triggers, but not onStartup . On the other hand, on every browser start you get onStartup event.

// background script
chrome.runtime.onStartup.addListener(function() {
  // Nuke things here, probably with chrome.browsingData API
});

Note that in case Chrome continues to run in the background when the last window is closed (eg a Chrome App is still running, or some extension requested the "background" permission), re-opening that window won't register as onStartup . A workaround is to use chrome.windows.onCreated to see if the newly opened window is the only one:

chrome.windows.onCreated.addListener(function() {
  chrome.windows.getAll(function(windows) {
    if (windows.length == 1) {
      // Chrome was running, but in background: it now "opened"
    }
  });
})