tabs.Tab

The type tabs.Tab contains information about a tab. This provides access to information about what content is in the tab, how large the content is, what special states or restrictions are in effect, and so forth.

Type

Values of this type are objects. They contain the following properties:

active

boolean. Whether the tab is active in its window. This may be true even if the tab's window is not currently focused.

The active tab is usually the selected one. However, on Firefox for Android, extension popups open in a new tab. When this popup tab is selected, the active tab will instead be the one in which the popup opened.

attention Optional

boolean. Indicates whether the tab is drawing attention. For example, when the tab displays a modal dialog, attention will be true.

audible Optional

boolean. Indicates whether the tab is producing sound. However, the user will not hear the sound if the tab is muted (see the mutedInfo property).

autoDiscardable Optional

boolean. Whether the tab can be discarded by the browser. The default value is true. When set to false, the browser cannot automatically discard the tab. However, the tab can be discarded by tabs.discard.

cookieStoreId Optional

string. The cookie store of the tab. If different tabs can have different cookie stores (for example, to support contextual identity), you can pass this as the storeId option into various methods of the cookies API, to set and get cookies associated with this tab's cookie store. Only present if the extension has the "cookies" permission.

discarded Optional

boolean. Whether the tab is discarded. A discarded tab is one whose content has been unloaded from memory, but is still visible in the tab strip. Its content gets reloaded the next time it's activated.

favIconUrl Optional

string. The URL of the tab's favicon. Only present if the extension has the "tabs" permission or host permissions. It may also be undefined if the page has no favicon, or an empty string if the tab is loading.

height Optional

integer. The height of the tab in pixels.

hidden

boolean. Whether the tab is hidden.

highlighted

boolean. Whether the tab is highlighted, i.e. part of the current tab selection. An active tab is always highlighted, but some browsers may allow additional tabs to be highlighted, for example by clicking them while holding Ctrl, Shift or ⌘ Command keys.

Firefox for Android doesn't support highlighting multiple tabs.

id Optional

integer. The tab's ID. Tab IDs are unique within a browser session. The tab ID may also be set to tabs.TAB_ID_NONE for browser windows that don't host content tabs (for example, devtools windows).

incognito

boolean. Whether the tab is in a private browsing window.

index

integer. The zero-based index of the tab within its window.

isArticle

boolean. True if the tab can be rendered in Reader Mode, false otherwise.

isInReaderMode

boolean. True if the tab is currently being rendered in Reader Mode, false otherwise.

lastAccessed

double. Time at which the tab was last accessed, in milliseconds since the epoch.

mutedInfo Optional

tabs.MutedInfo. The current muted state for the tab and the reason for the last state change.

openerTabId Optional

integer. The ID of the tab that opened this tab, if any. This property is only present if the opener tab still exists and is in the same window.

pinned

boolean. Whether the tab is pinned.

selected Deprecated

boolean. Whether the tab is selected. This property has been replaced by active and highlighted.

sessionId Optional

string. The session ID used to uniquely identify a Tab obtained from the sessions API.

status Optional

string. Either loading or complete.

successorTabId Optional

integer The ID of the tab's successor.

title Optional

string. The title of the tab. Only present if the extension has the "tabs" permission or host permissions that matches the tab's URL.

url Optional

string. The URL of the document that the tab is displaying. Only present if the extension has the "tabs" permission or a matching host permissions.

width Optional

integer. The width of the tab in pixels.

windowId

integer. The ID of the window that hosts this tab.

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

Example extensions

Note: This API is based on Chromium's chrome.tabs API. This documentation is derived from tabs.json in the Chromium code.