Open a tab in browser from a Chrome App

Question

Since the permission "tabs" and chrome.tabs API are not available in Chrome Apps, how can I open a tab in the browser with specified URL?

Answer 1

Try dynamically creating a link and call its click method.

function openTab(url) { 
    var a = document.createElement('a'); 
    a.href = url; 
    a.target='_blank'; 
    a.click(); 
}

You could then call that function like this:

openTab('http://google.com');

Update

The previous example opens the link in the default browser (which could be something other than Chrome)

If you want to force the link to open in chrome, use window.open

window.open('http://google.com');

Answer 2

In your manifest file, add "browser" to your permissions:

"permissions": ["browser", ...],

Then in your js file, call function chrome.browser.openTab to open your link on Chrome.

 chrome.browser.openTab({
   url: "your_url"
 });