Getting current browser url in Firefox Addon

Question

I within a panel and I want to get the current browser URL. Nothing so far works. Here's what I've tested:

Only thing that even returns anything, I get something like resource://jid0-18z0ptaugyu0arjkaoywztggyzg-at-jetpack/ and then my current panel resource. Obviously this is a scope problem but I don't know how to refer to the actual browser.

window.location.href 

I've tried literally everything in the biggest Stack Overflow thread on this: Get current page URL from a firefox sidebar extension. None of them return anything.

If it helps, I am using the Firefox Addon Builder.

Answer 1

getting the URL from a sidebar or popup

To retrieve the URL from a sidebar or popup requires tab permissions

"permissions": [
    "tabs"
  ]

then you need to find the tab you want. If you just want the active tab this would work fine, for anything more advanced I'd look here.

function getPage(){
  browser.tabs.query({currentWindow: true, active: true})
    .then((tabs) => {
      console.log(tabs[0].url);
  })
}

getting the URL from injected javascript

If you want the URL for a background task I suggest this method as you do not need permissions.

this will give you a background script and then inject a script onto almost any webpage on the internet.

"background": {
    "scripts": ["background.js"]
},

"content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": ["https://www.*"],
      "js": ["modify-page/URL.js"]
    }
  ],

this will be injected into webpages through the URL js and will send a message to your background js to use.

var service= browser.runtime.connect({name:"port-from-cs"});

service.postMessage({location: document.URL});

This code is in your background js and will collect each new page's url as it changes.

var portFromCS;

function connected(p) {
  portFromCS = p;
  portFromCS.onMessage.addListener(function(m) {
    if(m.location !== undefined){
      console.log(m.location);
    }
  });
}

browser.runtime.onConnect.addListener(connected);