How do I open a Chrome extension in its own window?

Question

I installed a Chrome Extension that plays the Pandora client in a web extension (Anesidora), it works fine, but I just can't seem to find a way to open this extension in its own window.

I have to fire up the Chrome browser, click on the extension next to the address bar, and then click on the extension, and as soon as I click away, the music extension disappears, having me to click on the extension and view my music controls again.

Is there a way to update the behavior of the JSON file or popup.html or even backgroud.html page, so this can be viewed all by itself in one page or something?

Answer 1

Existing answer by McSod covers a non-invasive method to open a popup of a third-party extension.

If your goal is to permanently modify an extension so that the click opens a separate window instead, and assuming that the popup page does not change throughout the lifetime of the extension, i.e.:

1. It's set by browser_action.default_popup in the manifest (assume "popup.html")
2. Nothing in the extension code calls chrome.browserAction.setPopup to change it.

Under those conditions, you need to perform 2 actions:

1. Remove the default_popup key from the manifest.

2. Modify the background script (or add one, if needed - with "persistent": false if that's the only function) to handle the click:

   chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(tab => {
     chrome.windows.create({
       url: chrome.runtime.getURL("popup.html"),
       type: "popup",
       focused: true,
       /* can also set width/height here, see docs */
     });
   });
   

Those are the simplest changes. You can add code that checks for presence of already opened window and re-focusing it instead.

Note that depending on the function of the popup, assumptions in its code (most likely, use of tabs API) can break, because it will be the "current tab/window" for itself instead of the page on which the button was clicked.

Answer 2

If I've understood you correctly you just need the URL of the popup.html. Do a right click on the player controls, choose Inspect and enter location.href in the console. This way you get the URL of the popup that you can use to open the controls in a new browser window.