Question

I have an idea for a chrome extension where I take a protocol, just for example, helloworld:// and in the url bar you could do helloworld://check this out and i could have the plugin alert "check this out" or do some other complex AJAX stuff?

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Is this a custom, made up, protocol? Chrome Extensions only operate on http, https, file or ftp schemes.

Or if you want to register a keyword in the address bar you can try the still experimental omnibox extension API. Then all text entered after a certain keyword is forwarded to a function which can process it and return a result, or maybe trigger other events.

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental.omnibox.html

Edit by Dan Atkinson

The above URL is now a 404. In the interest of keeping this answer relevant, the new url is:
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/omnibox.html