tabs.update()

Navigate the tab to a new URL, or modify other properties of the tab.

To use this function, pass the ID of the tab to update, and anupdateProperties object containing the properties you want to update. Properties that are not specified inupdateProperties are not modified.

This is an asynchronous function that returns aPromise.

Syntax

let updating = browser.tabs.update(  tabId,              // optional integer  updateProperties    // object)

Parameters

tabIdOptional

integer. Defaults to the selected tab of the current window.

updateProperties

object. The set of properties to update for this tab. To learn more about these properties, see thetabs.Tab documentation.

activeOptional

boolean. Whether the tab should become active. Does not affect whether the window is focused (seewindows.update). Iftrue, non-active highlighted tabs will stop being highlighted. Iffalse, does nothing.

autoDiscardableOptional

boolean. Whether the tab can be discarded by the browser. The default value istrue. When set tofalse, the browser cannot automatically discard the tab. However, the tab can be discarded bytabs.discard.

highlightedOptional

boolean. Adds or removes the tab from the current selection. Iftrue and the tab is not highlighted, it will become active by default.

If you only want to highlight the tab without activating it, Firefox accepts settinghighlighted totrue andactive tofalse. Other browsers may activate the tab even in this case.

loadReplaceOptional

boolean. Whether the new URL should replace the old URL in the tab's navigation history, as accessed via the "Back" button.

For example, suppose the user creates a new tab using Ctrl+T. By default, in Firefox, this would load "about:newtab". If your extension then updates this page usingtabs.update, withoutloadReplace, the "Back" button will be enabled and will take the user back to "about:newtab". If the extension setsloadReplace, then the "Back" button will be disabled and it will be just as if the URL supplied by the extension was the first page visited in that tab.

Note though that the original URL will still appear in the browser's global history.

mutedOptional

boolean. Whether the tab should be muted.

openerTabIdOptional

integer. The ID of the tab that opened this tab. If specified, the opener tab must be in the same window as this tab. Set to-1 to clear the setopenerTabId.

pinnedOptional

boolean. Whether the tab should be pinned.

selectedDeprecatedOptional

boolean. Whether the tab should be selected. This property has been replaced byactive andhighlighted.

successorTabIdOptional

integer. The id of the tab's successor.

urlOptional

string. A URL to navigate the tab to.

For security reasons, in Firefox, this may not be a privileged URL. So passing any of the following URLs will fail, withruntime.lastError being set to an error message:

chrome: URLs
#"/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Schemes/data">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,about:newtab). Non-privileged URLs (e.g.,about:blank) are allowed.

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.

Return value

APromise that will be fulfilled with atabs.Tab object containing details about the updated tab. Thetabs.Tab object doesn't containurl,title andfavIconUrl unless matchinghost permissions or the"tabs" permission has been requested. If the tab could not be found or some other error occurs, the promise will be rejected with an error message.

Examples

Navigate the active tab in the current window tohttps://developer.mozilla.org:

function onUpdated(tab) {  console.log(`Updated tab: ${tab.id}`);}function onError(error) {  console.log(`Error: ${error}`);}let updating = browser.tabs.update({ url: "https://developer.mozilla.org" });updating.then(onUpdated, onError);

Activate the first tab in the current window, and navigate it tohttps://developer.mozilla.org:

function onUpdated(tab) {  console.log(`Updated tab: ${tab.id}`);}function onError(error) {  console.log(`Error: ${error}`);}function updateFirstTab(tabs) {  let updating = browser.tabs.update(tabs[0].id, {    active: true,    url: "https://developer.mozilla.org",  });  updating.then(onUpdated, onError);}let querying = browser.tabs.query({ currentWindow: true });querying.then(updateFirstTab, onError);