Question

I want to write a short script so that on some event chrome will open up all the links on a page that match a certain regular expression. I’ve got all the logic down, I just don’t know much about programming for chrome. I googled how to create new tabs in chrome and I found that chrome.tabs.create is the method I want. However, when I try to test using the built in javascript console in chrome, it tells me that chrome.tabs is undefined. What can I do?

Answer 1

chrome.tabs will only be available on extension pages (that is, pages that begin with chrome-extension://). Create a new extension and have the background page of that extension open the tabs.

You’ll need to load code into your ordinary web page with a content script (or inject a file script via executeScript in your background page) that runs your link-gathering logic and the passes all the URLs to the background page, which can then call chrome.tabs.create.

I wish it were easier, but that’s really the simplest way. Background pages have access to the full extension API, but the rely on other scripts to run within ordinary web pages to give them instrustions via message passing.