What is the fastest communication between tabs in Google Chrome? - javascript

I want to use Google Chrome or a fork of Chromium as a studio for data browsing and transformation.
I know extensions have a messaging api but I wanted to see if anyone knew a way to coordinate work or content rendering between tabs or windows in Chrome.
Is there something faster and/or more flexible than chrome extensions for communicating between tabs?

Local storage is a good way to communicate as long as the tabs are on the same domain.

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How to get your webapp to interact with a chrome extension?

I have this project where I need my webapp to talk to a chrome extension. The documentation to get your webapp to send requests to this chrome extension is unfortunately for javascipt. So I'm wondering if someone can point me in the right direction to the equivalent feature in flutter (library or methods).
Here is the documented way of sending requests to the chrome extention:
https://www.icondev.io/docs/chrome-extension-connect

Communicate between remote Chrome extensions

I need to develop a Chrome extension that will be able to send messages between instances of the extension (i.e. active Chrome browsers with the extension installed around the world) very quickly (like push notifications).
I understand that the regular Chrome messaging (even the external type) only works with extensions installed on the same browser, not remote ones.
I'm looking for the best, simplest solution, that will provide quick communication between the clients. The only way I thought about is to get some server running (I don't have one, so I need to find an online service), and run a script that will continuously receive/forward data. Is that the best way? Is there a simpler solution to set up for very simple communication between the remote extension instances?

Is it possible to access Web Workers from a chrome extension?

I have an app which contains several iFrames and Web Workers which communicate via postMessages. I am interested in creating a chrome extension which lists and display all of the messages in a comfortable and easy to inspect way.
Is there a way to access the workers from the window that created them, without a reference to the created instance? (i.e - can I get a list of workers on a given site from the chrome dev-tools console?) Would it be possible to retrieve this information from a chrome extension?
Update
Since the Chrome Devtools Sources Panel does classify web-workers, I was hoping that this can be done with a devtools extension. I also searched through the frontend code of the devtools to understand how a worker is identified there and found this, but am still unable to find how I can get a reference to the workers using the chrome extension api.

Chrome Extension w/ Serial and Page Action

Currently, I have created a Chrome App that gets data from a serial connection using the Chrome App Serial API. My goal is to inject this data into a web page. I know this is capable with Chrome Extensions, but the issue there is that Chrome Extensions aren't capable of accessing the serial data on it's own. I also would like to use an Extension instead of an App because the Chrome Apps aren't going to be supported starting this year.
The only option I could think of is to use a Chrome App to get the serial data, send the data to an Extension, and then inject the data into a web page. This is definitely not preferable though. Besides the Chrome Apps not being supported, except for Chrome OS, I wouldn't like to have to have a user download the extension and the app just to implement this.
My preferred method would to have an Extension access the serial devices. Is this possible and/or is it going to possible in the future? If not, why?
Thanks in advance!

U2F support without the U2F Chrome extension

I've started fiddling around with U2F and it's looking really promising. Got myself some security keys and started digging into it.
I've managed to create a working register/login demo website which works well using the U2F tokens and the U2F Chrome extension.
However... and this is where my question arises:
I've also enrolled a security key for my Google account and immediately got struck by the fact that it works without using the U2F Chrome extension. As a matter of fact I've done all the Google enrollment and logins without even having the extension installed. How is this possible? I've read (some of) the FIDO specifications and saw that there may be two API levels: high - which is the u2f namespace exposed by the extension and - and low - which involves using MessagePort API. Maybe this is how Google does it? (also tried doing a chrome.runtime.connect(...) myself, but the chrome.runtime object is undefined in my web page)
Any pointer in the proper direction would be appreciated and of great value at this moment, as there aren't many resources available on this young project called U2F.
Chrome is white listing Google domains. Non-Google domains has to use the extension for now. However, this will change "very soon" according to Google -- this is documented here and mentioned by a Google developer in this webinar.
Edit: The extension is no longer required with Chrome 41. You can test it out here (Note: When accessed from and older version of Chrome, or not via HTTPS, the site will fall back to using the extension).

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