Question

I’ve been having a look at Chrome extensions and I’d like to create an extension that interacts with a web page using a sidebar. So, user clicks button to launch extension, and the current page splits, with the right hand portion displaying my extension. I tried below, but I see nothing (working or otherwise). I’m not overly surprised it’s not working as I do not have a sidebar.html file for one thing. The reason I have that in the manifest is because I saw it in another post in this site. The suggestion there was to use the “sidebar” line in manifest.json, but “sidebar” isn’t even mentioned in the documentation as being a valid part of the manifest syntax.

manifest.json:

{
  "name": "Test 1",
  "version": "1.0",
  "description": "Test Extension 1",
  "page_action": {
    "default_icon": "icon.png",
    "default_title": "Testing",
    "default_popup": "popup.html"
   },
  "sidebar" : {},
  "permissions": [
    "experimental"
  ]
}

popup.html:

<script>
  chrome.experimental.sidebar.show();
  chrome.experimental.sidebar.expand();
  chrome.experimental.sidebar.navigate({path: "sidebar.html"});
</script>

I’ve enabled ‘experimental’.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are opening, theoretically, the sidebar inside your popup, not in the current page.

You should add a content script in the page, with a function that opens the sidebar. So, in your popup you should just retrieve the current tab then call this function from it.

Also, as Boris Smus said in your question, sidebars will be discontinued in future versions. So I advice you to create your own sidebar frame via content scripts.

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Update

To help you, I’ve made a simple extension that create a sidebar on current page.

@Curtis hosted my sample extension on Github, you can clone it here.