Chrome Plugin: Accessing named pipes on Windows

Question

I need to write a plugin for Chrome which, if running on Windows and the browser's URL matches something specific, can open a named pipe to a certain process running on the OS.

What's the best choice of plugin for Chrome? Should I go with a Native Client or can I use something less intrusive (although I realize named pipes by definition are quite intrusive)?

Answer 1

Native Client is indeed sandboxed, as indicated by the comments, and NPAPI is retired.

Two current solutions for contacting a running native app are those:

1. Use HTTP, optionally with WebSockets, with the native application (or a proxy application that will talk to a third-party app using any native method, including pipes) acting as a server on localhost and the extension trying to connect to a known port. GhostText is an example of this architecture.

2. Use Native Messaging. It's important to understand limitations of this approach:

   • It acts as a pipe to an external process, but must follow the Native Messaging (JSON-based) protocol.
   • It cannot attach to a currently running process (or pipe): Chrome can only start a new instance of the Native Host, and contact cannot be initiated from outside.

   So with those limitations in mind, your Native Host would be a proxy that will, itself, attach to the named pipe in question and relay the data, translating it to/from the Native Messaging protocol.

Answer 2

You know, strangely enough I just noticed you can view named pipes via:

file://./pipe/

I discovered this when I was reading the Wikipedia article about them, copied it, and then later thought I copied a URL and accidentally pasted that into chrome instead.

You can't even access that from explorer or the file system.