Zaonce

This Planet is a Tedious Place...

16/01/12 How to detect an installed Chrome extension in a normal web page?

I searched for a while and was struggling to come up with a way to do this. Several people were suggesting that the extension should write an element into the page using a content script and then page could the check for it's existence. This seemed a bit inelegant and would also require a new version of the extension.

Then I found this gem from Gildas on the Chromium forums, which attempts to load an image resource from the extension:


function detectExtension( extensionId, callback ) 
{ 
  var img; 
  img = new Image(); 
  img.src = "chrome-extension://" + extensionId + "/icon16.png"; 
  img.onload = function() { callback( true ); }; 
  img.onerror = function() { callback( false ); }; 
}

Works a treat - just make sure that the file referenced, icon16.png in this case, is present in your extension folder.

posted by Gruntfuggly # 22:32 0 comments

23/12/11 Better write this one down...

I've just reset my Apple ID password. It's now 21 characters log, includes upper and lower case, contains digits, wasn't used in the past year and it's strength is still only 'moderate'.

So as far as Apple are concerned, I'm guessing the only really secure password is one you can't actually remember.

posted by Gruntfuggly # 22:21 0 comments

22/11/11 Fight the Power...

I've been getting more and more annoyed recently with Google returning search results that didn't contain the terms I'd searched for. So I looked into it, and they've removed the implicit + operator. Worse than that, they've removed it altogether so now you have to specify every search term in quotes!

The reasons why are fairly obvious (google plus) but I still think it's pretty annoying.

So I thought it might be worth trying another search engine. I started using duckduckgo thinking I'd be back to google pretty quickly but after about four weeks, I'm still using it. I've reverted to Google a couple of times, but it's easy to do so by prefixing your search with !g.

No adverts, and exactly what I searched for. Looks like a keeper...

posted by Gruntfuggly # 20:50 0 comments

25/09/11 Thinner, wider, smaller, bigger?

I'm not keen on Chrome's wider pinned tabs. I thought the whole idea of pinned tabs was to shrink them down so they take up less room...

posted by Gruntfuggly # 12:56 0 comments

31/08/11 Chrome scores an own goal

Google fired squarely at their own foot with their latest change to the Chrome App Store - comments left on extensions are now displayed in non-chronological order - apparently based on 'review helpfulness'.

This means it's now impossible to see where bugs are reported and fixed and allows non-helpful comments to appear at the top of the list!

I can't help thinking some beta-testing of this particular 'feature' might have been useful...

posted by Gruntfuggly # 09:37 0 comments

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