I am developing a Google Cast sender application and on my web page in chrome browser, I need to detect if the Google Cast extension is installed or not before doing something.
I did some searching and found some suggestions for detecting chrome extensions if developer owns both website and extension. In my case, I am trying to detect an extension not developed by me. Is there an API or another way to detect installation of a third party chrome extension?
The standard way (used by the library itself) of detecting whether the extension is installed is to try and load a web-accessible file from it.
This, however, leads to an unwanted effect of producing error messages in the console (which are "network" errors and not JS errors, and therefore cannot be hidden) when Cast is not installed.
Also, you should not do this probing yourself, specifically because you don't control Google Cast - and it's not guaranteed to be stable in how it operates internally. There is a library you're expected to use as a Sender, and you should rely on the library initialization callback for detecting Cast.