Chrome Extension Development: Action on extension disable

Question

I'm wondering if it's possible to have an action trigger when user disables/removes extension.

Possible actions: Show html page genre "We hate to see you go. Please check our website"

Would something like this work for this purpose ?

 chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function(tab) {   
     chrome.tabs.executeScript(null, {file: "myScript.js"}); 
});

with "myScript.js" holding the logic to execute on click.

taken from this post

edit : also found "No event will fire in case an extension is disabled or uninstalled"

might the onUninstalled event (from the API docs) not help me out here?

Answer 1

As you can see in the documentation browserAction.onClicked cannot be used for this task.

Since the only part of an extension that survives disabling/removing it is a content script, you can declare a content script that periodically tries to access your extension so a failure would indicate the extension is disabled.

Here's an example that displays a DOM element on the top of all open tabs:

manifest.json:

"content_scripts": [{
  "matches": ["<all_urls>"],
  "run_at": "document_start",
  "all_frames": true,
  "js": ["ping.js"]
}]

ping.js:

var pingTimer = setInterval(ping, 1000);

function ping() {
  var port = chrome.runtime.connect();
  if (port) {
    port.disconnect();
    return;
  }
  clearInterval(pingTimer);
  onDisabled();
}

function onDisabled() {
  document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend',
    '<div style="all:unset; position:fixed; left:0; top:0; right:0; height:2rem;' +
    ' background:blue; color:white; font: 1rem/2rem sans-serif; z-index:2147483647;">' +
    'We hate to see you go. Please check our website: ' +
    '<a style="all:inherit; color:cyan; display:inline; position:static;"' +
    ' href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a></div>');
}

Notes:

• This will only work on pages that allow content script injection. In other words, all except the browser built-in pages like chrome://settings in chromium-based browsers or about:addons in Firefox-based ones, the extension/addon webstore site, other extensions' pages.
• Opening a new tab with your site will be problematic as content scripts can't access chrome.tabs API, and all other standard JavaScript methods to open a new tab will be blocked by the default popup-blocking policy, which can be manually altered by a user, though.
• Of several chrome API available in a content script only chrome.runtime survives disabling an extension, apparently.
• When you re-enable or reload your extension its content scripts aren't reinjected automatically into the open tabs! You'll need to do it manually in your background/event page script using chrome.tabs.query and chrome.tabs.executeScript. Search for examples on StackOverflow.

Answer 2

Hi You can also use this

chrome.runtime.setUninstallURL('http://myurl', function callback(id) {
        console.log("successfully uninstall");
    });
}