Detecting Presence of your Chrome Extension

introduction this code snippet is a javascript script designed to interact with a chrome browser extension it sends a message to the specified chrome extension and expects a response if the extension exists and can be reached, it will respond with "true"; otherwise, it will not respond prerequisites before using this code, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place extension id you need to specify the extension id in the extensionid variable the extension id is a unique identifier for your chrome extension extension manifest ensure that you have properly set the extension id in your extension's manifest file ( manifest json ) under the "key" property if this is not set correctly, you may encounter the error unchecked runtime lasterror could not establish connection receiving end does not exist chrome browser this code is intended to be executed within a google chrome browser environment it checks for the availability of the chrome api, so it won't work in other browsers code explanation let's break down the code into its main components 1\ extension id const extensionid = "aokkbecooohkgppimfffkongjlpihbol"; this variable stores the unique identifier (id) of the chrome extension that you want to communicate with you should replace the value with the actual extension id you are targeting 2\ checking chrome api accessibility const ischromeapiaccessible = typeof window\ chrome !== "undefined" && typeof window\ chrome runtime !== "undefined" && typeof window\ chrome runtime sendmessage !== "undefined"; this code block checks whether the necessary chrome api objects and methods are accessible in the current browser environment it verifies the existence of window\ chrome and its runtime property, as well as the sendmessage method if any of these are undefined, it indicates that the chrome api is not accessible 3\ immediate function execution (() => { try { if (!ischromeapiaccessible) { return console log("stopping execution, chrome api is not accessible "); } window\ chrome runtime sendmessage( extensionid, { status "ping" }, (isconnected) => { if (!isconnected) { return console log( "stopping execution, failed to connect to the extension" ); } } ); } catch (err) { console error("failed to communicate with the extension", err); } })(); this code is wrapped in an immediately invoked function expression (iife), which means it runs immediately upon page load inside the iife, the following steps are performed it first checks if the chrome api is accessible using the ischromeapiaccessible variable if the chrome api is not accessible, it logs a message and stops execution if the chrome api is accessible, it attempts to send a message to the specified extension using window\ chrome runtime sendmessage it sends a "ping" message to the extension and provides a callback function that will be executed when a response is received if the extension does not respond (returns false ), it logs a message and stops execution if there are any errors during this process, it logs an error message conclusion this code serves as a way to check if a specific chrome extension is installed and accessible in the current browser environment it's useful for scenarios where you want to verify the presence of an extension before interacting with it make sure to replace the extensionid variable with the correct id for the extension you want to target