extensions

Twitter’s Javascript-based third party offerings include buttons and embedded content, which are handy for putting Twitter content into your website. Unfortunately, they break when included in a Chrome extension, due to the use of protocol-relative URLs. Luckily there’s a way to fix the problem, although it requires a bit of extra code.

Since starting my job at Twitter, I’ve spent a lot of time on dev.twitter.com, either reading documentation or posting on the discussion group. I’ve also been Tweeting a lot more, and I tend to switch back and forth a lot throughout the work day. My browsing habits tend to lead to a bunch of open tabs in Chrome, and I realized that I was losing productivity.

Chrome Extensions have been praised as being really easy to write, especially when compared with writing a Firefox xpi or a plugin for IE. But there’s still a few concepts that trip up developers regularly. One of these is the isolated worlds concept, and it leads to a lot of support questions in the group.

Last year between the time that the Chrome web store crazied everything up and the holidays shut everything down, I was invited to give an educational session at Add-on-Con 2010 on the topic of Chrome extensions.

I’ve gone in-depth on the structure of CRX files, but left out a crucial portion for anyone looking to host their own CRX from a server.

I’ve been working at Google for about three years now, and was fortunate enough to transfer onto the Chrome extensions team about a year ago. Mostly, I support developers working on Chrome extensions, but from time to time I work on projects for the team to keep my sanity. A good example of this is the Chrome extensions samples browser. The extension docs are built and hosted automatically from the Chromium source tree so I modified the docs build script to generate the gallery and zip each sample into an easily-downloadable archive.