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Scott Molinari for Quasar

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HYS # 2 - Have you seen BEX?

You might now be asking, BEX who?

It's not a girl's nickname for Becky or Rebecca or even the small village in Switzerland named Bex. Nope, today we're showcasing a new mode that is being made available to Quasar in an upcoming minor release.

Quasar prides itself on being a framework that allows you to "Write code once and simultaneously deploy it to multiple platforms". Since the release of version 1.0 of Quasar, you've been able to build Mobile Apps, SPA's, PWA's, SSR Apps, desktop apps.....

....and now!

Browser Extensions (BEX for short).

What can it do?

As with every mode in Quasar, we've taken the leg work out of creating your Browser Extension, so you can focus on functionality. With Quasar's new BEX mode, you can create new and exciting extensions, which have all the functionality available in browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, as noted below:

  • Override page content
  • Add to / alter the browser's interface
  • Intercept page requests
  • Be a full featured app that runs in the browser.
  • Interact with and alter the development tools of the browser.

Ever heard of Vue DevTools, AdBlock, Tampermonkey? They're all browser extensions. Could you imagine building a similar powerful extension? Maybe also for developer purposes or to make your users' lives more convenient or better?

Now you can with Quasar!

But, why should I use Quasar to create a BEX?

In short, for the same reasons you use it to create your other apps. Quasar comes complete with over 100 UI components, helpers, CSS classes, etc. It takes a ton of time out of developing your extension, allowing you to focus on the details.

Don't believe us? Good! Don't take our word for it - check out this Quasar-built Browser Extension, which is already live and in the wild: Widewizard.

Hats off to Allan Gaunt - a member of the core team - who wrote Quasar's BEX mode alongside Widewizard to ensure it handled "real world" problems. Widewizard makes it easy to publish any book you've written on multiple publishing websites, including Amazon and Google Play (and many more).

Watch this video to see it in action!

What browsers are supported?

Currently, Chrome and Firefox are supported. We've opted to keep the supported list to a minimum until the mode has been released and bedded in properly. Once this has been done we'll be looking into supporting other browsers (starting with all the Chromium based ones).

How do I get involved?

The documentation will soon be available on the Quasar website under the Quasar CLI -> Developing Browser Extensions.

As always, if you have any questions you can ask on the forum or our discord channel.

Conclusion

Quasar is continuing to provide you with the tools you need to do your developer job as efficiently as possible. We are grateful for continually being able to help push the modern web forward and to our supporters.

We look forward to working alongside you to enhance and perfect yet another new mode which sets Quasar leagues above the competition.

As always, happy coding!

The Quasar Team

Latest comments (4)

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oussama_he profile image
Oussama Heloulou

When developing in the BEX mode, and when using browser API, Does Quasar take care to polyfill the code or I should write it twice. e.g. Firfox uses browser.tabs and Chrome uses chrome.tabs

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smolinari profile image
Scott Molinari

I'm not certain to be honest. If you could, please go to the Quasar Discord and ask in the BEX channel.

chat.quasar.dev

Scott

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zmilan profile image
Milan Zivkovic

Awesome, thanks a lot for being The Framework :)

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webnoob profile image
webnoob

Splendid! :)