How to determine if a particular Chrome browser extension is installed, without any relationship with the extension provider

Question

How to determine if a particular Chrome browser extension is installed without contacting an extension provider?

This is a “content script” (i.e. javascript launched in the context of a web page) and therefore does not have access to chrome.i18n, chrome.extension, chrome.management objects.

Scenario: a person clicked a link to an RSS feed. But since the current Chrome does not support the RSS / Atom feed protocol, and the presentation of RSS feeds in Google Chrome is best mediated by one of the several available RSS Feed Reader extensions.

We recommend using the "RSS Subscription Extension (from Google)" and would like to suggest that the user install this link for the Chrome extension, and that’s all - but, of course, only if they haven’t installed it yet.

How can I request a list of extensions installed in a running Chrome browser?

Answer 1

You can try chrome.extension.getViews (object fetchProperties), which returns an array of JavaScript window objects for each of the pages working inside the current extension, or chrome.management.getAll (function callback), which returns a list of information about installed extensions and applications.