Feature: Eyedropper (Pick Color from Website)

[tobiasstrebitzer]

@narsenico I'd like to get your opinion on something that's haunting me for a long time now.

There's currently no browser-based colorpicker out there that allows "eyedropping" (picking a color from the current page). While there are some extensions that do so, i'm not aware of any project that tries to bridge that gap, to bring this functionality to the page javascript context.

As you're probably aware, todays' browsers simply don't provide an API for that.

Anyways, I'm playing with the Idea of using a browser-extension to bridge support to the pages' javascript context. As for user experience, I could see how a eye-dropper button decides to (1) open up the chrome extension page for install, or (2) start the eye-dropping feature if the extension is present. The extension itself would run silently in the background, and bring no visible GUI on its' own.

I'm not entirely sure whether this 'somewhat cumbersome' experience (requiring an extension install) breaks the design goal, however I'm still intrigued, as it would probably the first time that a javascript-based color picker gets even close to delivering on this functionality.

So, to sum it all up, I'm just curious to hear whether you think this could be a valuable addition, or whether eye-dropping is not as much of a requirement, or any other thoughts.