How Can I Detect YouTube Page Navigation to Dynamically Update a Chrome Extension's Content?

Detecting Page Navigation on YouTube and Seamlessly Altering Content

You're developing a Chrome extension to calculate and display the total length of videos in a YouTube playlist, but the script only operates after page refreshes. To overcome this limitation, it's crucial to detect page navigation seamlessly and modify the DOM accordingly.

Event Listeners for Page Transitions

YouTube doesn't reload pages during navigation, but rather replaces the history state. To detect this, several methods are available:

• Background Page: Use the webNavigation or tabs API in a background page or MV3 service worker.
• Content Script with Navigatesuccess Event: This event is available in modern Chrome.
• Content Script with YouTube's Custom Event: YouTube triggers the 'yt-navigate-start' event during navigation.

Using the 'yt-navigate-start' event provides a more responsive approach for altering content dynamically.

Implementation

manifest.json:

{
  "matches": [ "*://*.youtube.com/*" ],
  "js": [ "content.js" ],
  "run_at": "document_start"
}

content.js:

document.addEventListener('yt-navigate-start', process);

if (document.body) process();
else document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', process);

process Function:

function process() {
  if (!location.pathname.startsWith('/playlist')) {
    return;
  }
  // Process logic to gather and display total playlist length here
}

By leveraging the 'yt-navigate-start' event and implementing the necessary script logic, you can effectively detect and respond to page navigation on YouTube, seamlessly updating the page content without any delays or page refreshes.

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