Is it possible to determine a tab's opener within a Google Chrome extension?

Question

I am looking for a way to determine a given tab\'s opener (parent tab) within a Google Chrome extension.

I\'ve looked at the documention for Tab but there doesn\'t r

Answer 1

Further investigation has revealed that onCreatedNavigationTarget() does not always fire when you think it would to indicate an opener-opened relationship.

An additional hint can sometimes be found in the Tab object returned by chrome.tabs.onCreated/onUpdated in the .openerTabId parameter.

A comprehensive solution will probably have to rely on multiple of the methods described in these answers.

Answer 2

Chrome has added an experimental extension API which can accomplish this -- specifically webNavigation.onBeforeRetarget. http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/experimental.webNavigation.html

However since this is still experimental (not usable in Chrome stable versions or releasable on the Chrome Web Store) I have ended up using another approach.

Basically:

In content_script.js:

chrome.extension.sendRequest({
    request: {
        op: "pageLoadStarted", 
        url: document.location.href, 
        referrer: document.referrer
    }
}); 

In background.html:

chrome.extension.onRequest.addListener(function(request, sender, sendResponse) { 
    console.log('onRequest: ' + JSON.stringify(request)); 
    console.log(JSON.stringify(sender)); 
  }); 

This approach allows me to obtain the referrer of a tab, which I can then correlate with an existing tab's url. This isn't always a one-to-one mapping, so I do some additional magic such as preferring the currently selected tab as the opener if its url matches the new tab's referrer.

This really is just a hack to approximate the functionality that would be provided more simply and accurately by webNavigation.onBeforeRetarget or window.opener.

Answer 3

Update: it is now possible to reliably determine a tab's opener tab within a Chrome extension natively using the newly added webNavigation API, and specifically by hooking the onCreatedNavigationTarget event.

https://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/webNavigation.html

Answer 4

port.onMessage.addListener(
     function(msg) {
         var tabid = port.sender.tab.openerTabId;
         console.log("Received message from tab that was opened by tab id : " + tabid);
         // reliably shows the tab id of the tab that opened
         // the tab sending the message
     });