To launch/activate/run Chrome extension with a clickable webpage link?

Question

I have always been using Safari but I pulled the plug on Safari completely a while ago, and the ability to do a lot of things with Chrome, makes me want to be able to do more.

Here is what I was wondering: I have a lot of newly installed extensions and webapps. I know there are extensions that can be used upon activation and other extensions that run in the background without the need for it to be activated by clicking a button of the extensions icon. Is there a way to launch (activate) an extension in chrome with a link (URL) in a webpage. I mean is there a URL path to activating an extension.

Also, I like the pinned tab feature, but it seems I can only do this: Pin a tab and for it to open just like that every time by adding current tabs to 'open these pages'. But if I pinned for eg. gmail.com and then I close it and later open it up again little later it won't pin it. Is using JSON with the 128 px icon and making your own web app the only way this can be achieved?

Thank you.

Answer 1

As far as I know: No. What I got from reading through the Chrome-docs is, that websites can connect to activated extensions by using the Chrome API's method runtime.connect.

I know there are extensions [...] activated by clicking a button of the extensions icon

This doesn't seem to be a general feature of Chrome extensions. The Chrome-intern activation can be found at chrome://extensions/ in your browser. These settings can't be modified by websites. You may want to create a work-around by using a "second" activation-layer in your extension. Websites can only ask the browser to install extensions by using the webstore API.

To your second question: This chrome-extension should allow you to automatically pin tabs specified by your url (haven't tried it for myself though). Maybe this can solve your problem.