How to install a Chrome browser extension in Browserbox? about browserbox

[o0101]

Hello @aiesst ! thank you for your great question.

This will probably sound like awful news to you, but because this feature requires Chrome's new headless mode, which is currently experimental and somewhat unstable, the BrowserBox extensions feature is currently very experimental, and needs to be enabled manually right now!

So, we feel sorry for those of you who want that right now, but if you'd like to go ahead and play with this (which unfortunately we can't officially support right now outside of a dedicate support or deployment tier -- see more on that below, or reach out to us at [email protected]) this is how you can attempt it:

In order to install an extension, you need to adjust the flags passed to Chrome. Please see here for information on the flags required.

Note that you'll need to use --headless=new (read about it here). Also, note that, because headless=new is currently experimental in Chrome, and still has some stability issues, BrowserBox does not yet officially support the new headless mode.

If in future Chrome's new headless mode becomes stable, then we may make using it, and adding extensions, available via our upcoming BrowserBox Developer API, or via configurable code switches, or both! At that time we will bring it into the open-source main trunk for everyone to use. It's also good to know that we have plans to introduce a parallel BrowserBox extensions API that is independent of the existing Chrome API but covers lots of the same ground, and even provides some additional capabilities, so stay tuned for that, too! 😹

Finally, if you simply want to inject a bit of JavaScript into each page loaded (like an extensions content script), you can do so via customizing the injectionsScroll in BrowserBox with no command-line or mode changes needed! If that's all you need it will already work off the bat, and depending on your skill level might be fairly easy to configure! 😆

Thanks for your questions! While we don't have the resources to provide additional free development support on this feature here right now (as we are currently super busy with existing customer deployments and features), if you do require additional dedicated development support, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] -- we currently offer a number of paid tiers of development support giving you dedicated access to our expertise to help your team. Thank you for your cooperation and for considering BrowserBox!