I started to work on a very cool Chrome extension and I ran into a little problem.
I want to allow my user to share a link. By sharing this link, other users can get some information with my extension.
The problem is when a user click on the shared link, I want to check if my Chrome extension is installed on his browser. If it does – great, else – I want to redirect him to download my extension.
Any ideas how to?
Make the extension add an invisible element to the DOM of every page that it loads, marking it with a unique ID. When the user clicks on that link, run some javascript to check for that element — if it doesn’t exist, then you know the extension hasn’t been installed.