How to programmatically open a chrome extension popup window from background.html

Question

Thanks in advance!

What I want to achieve is to open the popup window when a special tag is detected on a webpage by my extension. After searching for a while it seems like the popup can only be opened when user clicks the extension. Is it true?

Or could I get the location of my extension's icon on browser? Maybe I could draw a window and display under the extension icon to make it looks just like the popup window.

Answer 1

This guy wants opposite effect and can't get his popup window not to open. Take a look at his code to open your popup page ;)

Answer 2

It is impossible to get the extension window to open without a user clicking on it... However, you can get the extension popup page to open in a new tab as follows:

1) Set your background page in your manifest file...

"background_page": "background.html", 

This is where you will run the code to see whether the special tag is detected... background pages can constantly run code in the background, and it is up to you to set a repeat loop to check whether you variable condition is true every so often...

2) Enable tabs permission in your manifest file...

"permissions": [ "tabs" ], 

This permission is needed for step 3 (Allows the background page to open a new tab)

3) In background page, call create and point to the extension popup url.

if(condition == true){   chrome.tabs.create({url:"popup.html"}); }