By Clint • July 15, 2010 • Code, Idea • 1 Comment

I was reading LifeHacker and came across this post regarding how to enable Google Apps in Chrome. Curious, I dug into the extensions and noticed… well, they’re pretty simple. So I decided to create my own.

I decided to create one for Facebook. It only took me five minutes:

The Chrome "New Tab" page with Facebook added...

The LifeHacker post contains all the details regarding how to enable apps in the latest Chromium builds. All you need to do is copy the contents of one of the manifest.json files in one of the apps bundled with Chrome:


{
  "name": "Google Calendar",
  "version": "1.3",
  "permissions": [ "notifications" ],
  "icons": {
    "128": "128.png",
    "24": "24.png",
    "32": "32.png",
    "48": "48.png"
  },
  "app": {
    "urls": [
      "*://www.google.com/calendar/"
    ],
    "browse_urls": [
      "https://www.google.com/accounts/"
    ],
    "launch": {
      "container": "tab",
      "web_url": "https://www.google.com/calendar/"
    }
  }
}

and substitute your own values and icons:


{
  "name": "Facebook",
  "version": "0.1",
  "permissions": [  ],
  "icons": {
    "128": "128.png",
    "24": "24.png",
    "32": "32.png",
    "48": "48.png"
  },
  "app": {
    "urls": [
      "*://www.facebook.com/"
    ],
    "browse_urls": [
      "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php"
    ],
    "launch": {
      "container": "tab",
      "web_url": "http://www.facebook.com"
    }
  }
}

If you’re interested, you can download my ZIP file here, facebook-chrome-app, then follow the same instructions to enable it in your own Chrome browser.

See? Easy… happy hacking!