I'm in the process of writing a Google Chrome extension, and I'm hung up on what should be a very simple task. I have a browser action that opens a popup, "popup.html", which then loads a small Javascript file, "popup.js". As soon as I get the DOMContentLoaded signal from the popup page, my Javascript opens a new tab with a certain URL. This behavioral quirk is by design - in some cases it will display a menu, and in other cases it will just open this URL.
I currently have some very simple code which is supposed to do this, but whenever it opens this tab, Chrome suddenly closes. I'm using a Mac (OS X Mavericks), so it doesn't crash entirely (still running), the window just closes. When I open it up again, the tab it was supposed to open is there, but the "popup.html" menu is awkwardly hanging over the UI still and won't go away.
Here is my complete popup.js file:
function stuff() {
window.open("http://stackoverflow.com/");
}
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', stuff);
I'm guessing that I may need to gracefully close my popup window before going to this link or something, but that seems like I'm overthinking it. After all, I've seen other extensions that have normal links in their browser action popups, and you can click those to open new tabs without any Javascript magic.
I've also tried using the chrome.tabs.create function, yet the same thing happens. The Chrome developer console doesn't show any errors. Thoughts?
Edit1: Just disabled all extensions and tried again. Still breaking. Going to boot up my Windows 8 box and see what happens on it.
Edit2: Works with a short delay before opening the window now on Mac, see my answer below.
Ok, I think I may have figured this out, but it's still weird. I did this on my Windows 8 PC, and the browser didn't crash, but the browser action popup didn't close the way it's supposed to either.
On a hunch, I altered my code on the Mac to give the browser some time to render the popup window:
function stuff() {
window.open("http://stackoverflow.com/");
}
setTimeout(stuff, 500);
Worked without a problem on the Mac this time. I'm guessing it's an issue with the browser being interrupted while rendering the popup window, but it's still weird. I would still appreciate an explanation from someone who actually knows what's going on here! :-)
Related
I have a Chrome extension I built that I've been testing. It runs fine on PC and never crashes. But on MAC, occasionally/randomly the popup window suddenly closes, presumably because some kind of unhandled exception occurred. I didn't click outside the popup or do anything that would naturally cause it to close. But I was doing things inside the popup window that calls functions, so I believe that some kind of error is occurring, but it only happens on Mac.
What is even worse, as soon as the extension popup closes, it cannot be opened again. Clicking on the extension icon (which normally causes the popup to appear as a small window just beneath the icon) does nothing. Click, click, click...nothing.
The problem is, the associated Chrome developer console window linked to the extension popup also closes whenever the popup closes, so I can't think of any way to discover the error that is happening.
Is there some way I can discover what is causing my extension popup to unexpectedly close? And/or any way to discover why it won't show the popup again after it closes unexpectedly?
Note: I'm all about showing source code, but in this case it would seem unhelpful because I don't know which code to show. My extension popup has thousands of lines of javascript, and it all works fine on a windows PC.
Any ideas?
I'm running this javascript to click a link through my Chrome browser
document.getElementById('extractResults').click();
It's clicking fine, until I navigate away from the browser tab or window. Any insights into how to execute the action even after I've navigated away from the tab?
Thanks!
I guess it depends on how you're "running this javascript"... are you using setInterval() or something similar?
You might do a google search for "javascript background tabs" -- there are a lot of related issues (such as this and this) and the bottom line seems to be that modern browsers are saving CPU (etc) by not running everything when in the background.
In my page when I click on a link a popup will be opened. In that popup, I have the close button. To close the window I am using simple JavaScript function as window.close().
This is working fine.
Now when I copy the URL of the popup link and open it in new window, I am not able to close the window.
In Firefox when using Firebug the warning given is:
'Scripts may not close windows that were not opened by script.'
Please help me out on any other alternative.
Firefox seems to answer that question: 'Scripts may not close windows that were not opened by script.'
This is a security measure. Imagine every site could close every other page you have open, that wouldn't work very well would it?
That's why only a parent window may close its children windows.
There may be a setting Firefox that allows windows not opened by script to be closed by script, but even if there is, what chance is there that your visitors will all have enabled this setting?
You can't work around this problem, it is how Firefox (and certainly other browsers) works. The only answer is to change your approach.
Why are you using windows as popups anyway? This has not been recommended for some time now and is mostly frowned upon. Popups that are actual windows may be blocked by popup-blockers.
You should probably use a modal popup instead of a window
Here is what I need to do:
I want to launch a popup window when the user exits the website.
I found code that detects when the user closes the window, but that same code ALSO fires when the user clicks on an internal link,
(which I don't want).
Any ideas how to do this?
I've looked everywhere and I can't find a clear solution.
This solution needs to work on all three browsers : FireFox / IE / Safari!
You can't, there is no such event that will be triggered when someone exits the site. That's why in the early 2000s someone too clever invented "pop-unders": popups that will open immediately, but will be put on the background, behind the browser's window.
Which are one of the most annoying things on the web, and the first ones that any popup blocker or antivirus will kill :) On the other side, there are legitimate uses for that, like most surveys you see (I got one from microsoft some days ago).
Never rely on popups, unless you are writing an intranet site, or one where you are sure all of your visitors will not have a popup blocker.
I have some JavaScript that makes an AJAX call and, if the call fails, opens a new windows (tab in Firefox) and displays the response from the server in that window. This is very convenient for debugging, because the error is typically from Pylons, so it's a full HTML page.
The only problem is that the new tab becomes the active tab, which would totally confuse a regular user. Is there any way to open the tab/window, but not make it active, ie. keep the current active window?
My code currently looks like this:
errorWindow = window.open("", "TCerrorWindow")
if (errorWindow)
errorWindow.document.write(xhr.responseText);
You can call errorWindow.blur(); window.focus(); after, forcing the browser to return focus to the previous window.
The effect you're trying to achieve is commonly called a pop-under window.
AFAIK this is not possible, as a security measure against pop-under windows. For debugging purposes you could
use Firebug (with a handy console, where you can output your own log messages from the code)
create a debug layer (div) on your page, where you output error messages in case an error happens