tabs.create()

Creates a new tab.

This is an asynchronous function that returns a Promise.

Syntax

let creating = browser.tabs.create(
  createProperties   // object
)

Parameters

createProperties

object. Properties to give the new tab. To learn more about these properties, see the tabs.Tab documentation.

active Optional

boolean. Whether the tab should become the active tab in the window. If false, it has no effect. Does not affect whether the window is focused (see windows.update). Defaults to true.

cookieStoreId Optional

string. Use this to create a tab whose cookie store ID is cookieStoreId. This option is only available if the extension has the "cookies" permission. See Work with contextual identities for more information.

discarded Optional

boolean. Whether the tab is created and made visible in the tab bar without any content loaded into memory, a state known as discarded. The tab's content is loaded when the tab is activated.

index Optional

integer. The position the tab should take in the window. The provided value will be clamped to between zero and the number of tabs in the window.

muted Optional

boolean. Whether the tab should be muted. Defaults to false.

openerTabId Optional

integer. The ID of the tab that opened this tab. If specified, the opener tab must be in the same window as the newly created tab.

openInReaderMode Optional

boolean. If true, open this tab in Reader Mode. Defaults to false.

pinned Optional

boolean. Whether the tab should be pinned. Defaults to false.

selected Optional

boolean. Whether the tab should become the selected tab in the window. Defaults to true.

Warning: This property is deprecated, and is not supported in Firefox. Use active instead.

title Optional

string. The title of the tab. Allowed only if the tab is created with discarded set to true.

url Optional

string. The URL to navigate the tab to initially. Defaults to the New Tab Page.

Fully-qualified URLs must include a scheme (for example, 'http://www.google.com' not 'www.google.com').

For security reasons, in Firefox, this may not be a privileged URL. So passing any of the following URLs will fail:

chrome: URLs
javascript: URLs
data: URLs
file: URLs (i.e., files on the filesystem. However, to use a file packaged inside the extension, see below)
privileged about: URLs (for example, about:config, about:addons, about:debugging). Non-privileged URLs (e.g., about:blank) are allowed.
The New Tab page (about:newtab) can be opened if no value for URL is provided.

To load a page that's packaged with your extension, specify an absolute URL starting at the extension's manifest.json file. For example: '/path/to/my-page.html'. If you omit the leading '/', the URL is treated as a relative URL, and different browsers may construct different absolute URLs.

windowId Optional

integer. The window to create the new tab in. Defaults to the current window.

Return value

A Promise that will be fulfilled with a tabs.Tab object containing details about the created tab. If the tab could not be created (for example, because url used a privileged scheme) the promise will be rejected with an error message.

The promise returned by browser.tabs.create() resolves as soon as the tab has been created. The tab may still be loading. To detect when the tab has finished loading, listen to the tabs.onUpdated or the webNavigation.onCompleted event before calling tabs.create.

Examples

Open "https://example.org" in a new tab:

function onCreated(tab) {
  console.log(`Created new tab: ${tab.id}`);
}

function onError(error) {
  console.log(`Error: ${error}`);
}

browser.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(() => {
  let creating = browser.tabs.create({
    url: "https://example.org",
  });
  creating.then(onCreated, onError);
});

Example extensions

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

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