Sandbox telegrams, or, how your Chrome extension can interact with page content scripts

In AdGrok’s GrokBar, we inject a “heads-up display” on pages that the user is advertising. The heads-up display is actually an iframe that’s positioned within a browser-extension-injected div, and that iframe renders content from our secure server farm. You can see a demo video here (and see that we truly spared no expense on the voice-over talent!).

I wanted to make our extension’s button-click incant a javascript method that was inside the GrokBar’s iframe. I found this horrible hack, but every time a javascript timer scrapes a hidden DOM element, or mucks with the URL fragment of an iframe src in order to send messages, the code gods kick a puppy.

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Speed up Firefox!

My Firefox on Mac was getting pretty lethargic — almost a minute to spin up, and multiple seconds to just open a new tab. I installed the new beta of Google Chrome, and remembered how nice a speedy browser was.

Google Chrome for Mac is a nice first effort, but without custom search engines, and all the other firefox add-ons, the shininess gets pretty tarnished. I needed my fast firefox back!

I made just a couple changes, though, and my Firefox is back to it’s prior speedy self!

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