How To Make a Chrome Extension
Chrome’s rising popularity as the world’s pre-eminent web browser makes it a great time for developers to write Chrome extensions. According to NetMarketShare.com, Chrome makes up over 58% of the desktop browsing market right now. Luckily, Google makes it easy to publish Chrome extensions, plus you get to use technologies that you already know. Chrome extensions are bundles of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files that add some functionality to Chrome. Some examples are Pocket for keeping track of articles you want to read and Reddit Enhancement Suite which adds infinite scroll and other goodies to Reddit.com. Chrome extensions are also great for businesses that already have an API to leverage, because extensions can serve as another platform for users to find your app and are always visible in the browser toolbar (the Evernote Web Clipper for keeping track of things you see on the web is one example). Another example of where you might use a Chrome Extension is to help you automate tasks that you find yourself doing all the time. At Metova, developers use Jenkins, a continuous integration tool that runs a project’s full test suite each time code is committed before deploying an application. If a build fails and your project is configured with Junit, Jenkins will save the names and stack traces of the failed tests. That information is not always easy to access if you’re trying to compare the results of multiple failed builds, so I made an extension called Evil Jenkins to help developers do just that.
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