I was creating a document in Office365 the other day - something I’ve done a hundred times - but when I tried to paste with their custom right-click menu I was greeted with a popup telling me to download a browser addon. Well, that’s weird.
I migrated my addons to MV3, and learned that version numbers increase, DRY is overrated, and 3 and 15 are probably important but I have no idea why. What I didn’t learn is how MV3 made my addon better.
If you’ve ever dug into the underpinnings of a browser extension, or maybe even created one yourself, you’ve seen the manifest.json file that acts as a sort of usage guide for an extension. Not the kind of usage guide most people would want to read, but it’s vital for browsers. The manifest file tells them what name and version to display, who the author is, what permissions to request access to, which icons to display, what css and js files to load and when. It’s important, but once you get the hang of it, pretty simple to implement. You create it and move on, only ever reopening it to bump the version when you’ve got something new to publish, and maybe requesting a new permission. ...
Ever needed to link directly to one section of a webpage? You can, as long as there’s a header (or another element nearby like a div) with an ID assigned to it. Getting the ID isn’t tough, but it’s a bit of a pain. It doesn’t have to be that hard.
We all have our favorite web browser with our favorite extensions loaded, but have you ever considered writing your own? In the past few months I’ve created a couple extensions to suit my own needs. Here’s what I’ve learned!