Tips / Resources for building a Google Chrome plugin

Question

After test driving Google Chrome for 30 minutes or so, I like it, even if it seems bare-bones at the moment. The obvious way to add a few things I can't live without would be through plugins. Does anyone have any links to resources on how to get started building a plugin/addon for Chrome? Thanks.

Answer 1

Chrome does support the netscape plugin api, but that is for displaying certain kinds of content.

You seem to be after a extention api, really firefox is the only major browser to encourage and support third party extentions to browsing capability (that aren't simply new toolbars)

Nothing in the developer documentation points to a browser enhancing api - google seem to want to keep a tight reign on the look and feel of the application.

You might find a more conclusive answer on the development site:

dev.chromium.org, and some of the developers might be on irc on #chromium on freenode.

Answer 2

I haven't seen anything about an extensibility API for Chrome yet; it may be too early in its lifetime for that to be released.

Answer 3

Thanks for the answers. From reading the Chrome comic book, I thought there would be a real addon api available, similar to Firefox.

Answer 4

Matt Cutts (the Google SEO guru) has a Q&A about chrome, and writes about it:

Q: But I can’t install extension X! Google Chrome is dead to me if I can’t use extension X!
A: Then you’ll have to use another browser for a while. Google Chrome currently doesn’t support browser extensions (it does support plug-ins, such as Flash). I’m sure that extensions/add-ons are something that the Chrome team would like to do down the road, but the Chrome team will be a bit busy for a while, what with the feedback from the launch plus working on Mac and Linux support. I’d suggest that you give Google Chrome a try for a few days to see if enjoy browsing even without extension X. A lot of really cool extension-like behaviors such as resize-able textareas and drag-and-drop file upload are already built into Google Chrome.

Answer 5

Chromium supports NPAPI plugins which is harder to program compared to Firefox extensions. However NPAPI has better performance and is more versatile.

Checkout this minimalistic example of an NPAPI plugin.

Answer 6

Hi,

If anyone's still interested here is a link to the latest extensions developer documentation page for Google chrome.

NOTE: Plugins (NPAPI) and extensions(JS Based) are not the same

From the doc...

Extensions are small software programs that can modify and enhance the functionality of Google Chrome.

You write them using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. So if you know how to write web pages, you already know most of what you need to know to write extensions.

Answer 7

Chrome now supports extensions and themes. Here is the documentation for developing extensions, and this is a page which describes theme creation.