Question

I’m developing a Chrome extension that ships jQuery and jquery is referenced from the manifest.json and works as expected when I reference to it from other JS files in my extension package.

However from Chrome console, even though I know my extension is loaded jQuery is not accessible

I tried accessing it like this:

$('div').append(); etc. or
jQuery

and neither of them works.

Not having console with jQuery support hinders the development process a lot.

Answer 1

I would define your additional content script which would embed jQuery into every page.

manifest.json

{
    "name": "Content script",
    "version": "0.1",
    "content_scripts": [{
        "matches": ["http://*/*"],
        "js": ["jquery-loader.js"]
    }]
}

And inside jquery-loader.js:

var script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = 'jquery.min.js';
(document.body || document.head).appendChild(script);

This way you would have jQuery on any page.