I am in the process of building a Chrome extension, and for the whole thing to work the way I would like it to, I need an external JavaScript script to be able to detect if
You could have the extension set a cookie and have your websites JavaScript check if that cookie is present and update accordingly. This and probably most other methods mentioned here could of course be cirvumvented by the user, unless you try and have the extension create custom cookies depending on timestamps etc, and have your application analyze them server side to see if it really is a user with the extension or someone pretending to have it by modifying his cookies.