Extensions for fluid browser how to#
Extensions for fluid browser install#
Extensions for fluid browser code#
Extensions for fluid browser free#

If you’re new to browser extensions, this should help you to understand the flow. Let’s review together the architecture of this extension.

Opera maintains its own list of extension APIs supported by its browser.

Mozilla Firefox shares its current Chrome incompatibilities.

Of course, you’ll also need to use the subset of the API supported by all browsers. So, it’s very simple to create a little trick to support all browsers and namespace definitions, thanks to the beauty of JavaScript:

Extensions for fluid browser code#

Most of the code and tutorials you’ll find use the namespace chrome.xxx for the Extension API ( chrome.tabs, for instance).īut, as I’ve said, the Extension API model is currently being standardized to browser.xxx, and some browsers are defining their own namespaces in the meantime (for example, Edge is using msBrowser).įortunately, most of the API remains the same behind the browser. Tip To Make Your Code Compatible With All Browsers

Extensions for fluid browser free#

Feel free to modify the code for other products you want to test. You can find the code for this small browser extension on my GitHub page. If you don't have a Bing key, the extension will always fall back to the Web Speech API, which is supported by all recent browsers.īut feel free to try other similar services: We'll also use a small library that I wrote recently to call this API from JavaScript. You'll need to generate a free key again. This is also free to use (with a quota, too).

Bing Text to Speech API, Microsoft Cognitive Services.To get an idea of what this API can do, play around with it. You'll need to generate a free key replace the TODO section in the code with your key to make this extension work on your machine. Computer Vision API, Microsoft Cognitive Services.You’ll notice that, even when the Computer Vision API is analyzing some CGI images, it’s very accurate! I’m really impressed by the progress the industry has made on this in recent months. The video below demonstrates it in Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Brave. When you click on one of the images, the extension queries the Computer Vision API to get some descriptive text for the image and then uses either the Web Speech API or Bing Speech API to share it with the visitor. My little proof of concept simply extracts images from a web page (the one in the active tab) and displays the thumbnails in a list. Indeed, using today’s AI algorithms in the cloud, as well as text-to-speech technologies, exposed in the browser with the Web Speech API or using a remote cloud service, we can very easily build an extension that analyzes web page images with missing or improperly filled alt text properties. I was recently inspired while listening to a great talk by Chris Heilmann in Lisbon: “ Pixels and Hidden Meaning in Pixels.” Still, I’ve been looking for something that would help blind people in a more general way.

Extensions for fluid browser how to#

In my case, I’m concerned with accessibility on the web and I’ve already spent some time thinking about how to make a breakout game accessible using web audio and SVG, for instance. We’ll see that, with a few lines of code, we can create some powerful features in the browser. Let’s build a proof of concept - an extension that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision to help the blind analyze images on a web page. Don’t worry: Building one is simple and straightforward. So, if you’ve never built an extension before or don’t know how it works, have a quick look at those resources.

Microsoft (also, see the great overview video “ Building Extensions for Microsoft Edge”).

I won’t cover the basics of extension development because plenty of good resources are already available from each vendor: Note: We won’t cover Safari in this article because it doesn’t support the same extension model as others. Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave and Vivaldi), and provide some simple tips on how to get a unique code base for all of them, but also how to debug in each browser.

Extensions for fluid browser install#

I’ll explain how you can install this extension that supports the web extension model (i.e. Indeed, the Chrome extension model based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is now available almost everywhere, and there is even a Browser Extension Community Group working on a standard. In today’s article, we’ll create a JavaScript extension that works in all major modern browsers, using the very same code base.