PagePlatter - Chrome Extension

What is this

This is a Chrome extension which can render many websites at once and display them in little windows. The module can save the sites you would like to view and the position at which the window should be centered. This allows for instant viewing of many pieces of information that may be displayed on multiple sites.

This is particularly useful if you frequently need visit the same sites or compare the data between multiple sites. Rather than opening each site every time you can click once (on the extension icon) and then all sites are rendered simultaneously.

Screen Shot

Notes

• This hasn't really been polished but its functional and doesn't look too bad.
• The UI should be very easy to use. In short though:
  • You can add a site to the list by visiting it normally and then clicking the save page button.
  • You can save a rendering position for a particular page by scrolling to it and then clicking the set position button.
  • To remove a page from the list click 'Remove Click' and 'Clear All' will remove all pages and insert the default welcome page.
• To make the welcome page render you may need to change the path that is set in the code.js file to include your extension ID. It is a global in the Platter object.
• Setting a scroll position on an iframe is close to impossible so instead the frames are wrapped in a div that we use to scroll.
• This extension was tested without iframes and using Ajax to dump HTML into divs before however this led to nuclear war between all the CSS on different sites. iframe - although they have many policy and security issues at least contain all the formating. Apparently HTML 5 has something to do this well that is coming out shortly?
• Almost all pages render. The only ones which will not are the ones hosted on a server which does not allow iframe rendering. Google, for example, will not work.
• This project was really just used as a chance to learn extensions and JavaScript.

Security Warning

• To make this extension work many security measures had to be removed. In particular the Same Origin Policy has been somewhat subverted. Using a Chrome extension gives greater power in rendering HTML from foreign origins however this does not make it safe.
• There is overwhelming potential for XSS attacks on this extension.
• My advise is, probably don't use this extension.