Tell HN: Google ships a hidden extension in all Chromium builds for Google Meet

9 points

3 years ago

Google Meet comes with a few features that no other web apps can use

- The troubleshooting modal shows CPU usage [1]

- When screen sharing you can configure the type of screen share (tab/window/screen) in your code

What is surprising here is that there is no public API for both of these. Instead every Chromium build comes with a special Hangout extension pre-installed. Google Meet then uses `postMessage` to communicate with this extension and call APIs that are available in the Extension context.

Here is the code for the extension inside Chromium source https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/thunk.js?q=thunk.js

This extension is only available to *.google.com web apps https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/resources/hangout_services/manifest.json;l=12

Even though these features might not seem very important, this is still blatant anti-competitive behaviour from google

[1] https://twitter.com/henrylim96/status/1551906796696133637

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