navigation（navigation 搜索）

Navigation — Loading URLs and Managing Tabs

Covers navigate, navigate_back, navigate_forward, tabs_*, and the wait-for-ready patterns every other skill depends on. Read chrome-bridge first if you haven't.

Single-tab loads

navigate(url='https://example.com')            # uses the active tab
navigate(url='https://example.com', tab_id=N)  # targets a specific tab

navigate returns once Chrome has dispatched the load — not once the DOM is ready. Always confirm before interacting:

execute_script(code="(()=>({url:location.href, title:document.title}))()")
# → check .url for redirects/consent walls/geo-rewrites; .title to confirm you got the page you asked for
# Or, if you have the tab id: tabs_get(tab_id).url / .title

Wait for ready

No sleep tool exists. Poll document.readyState:

execute_script(code="(function(){ return document.readyState; })()")
# Repeat until it returns "complete". Most pages get there in <3s.

For SPAs where readyState=complete fires before hydration, poll for a known element instead:

execute_script(code="(function(){ return !!document.querySelector('main [data-loaded=true]'); })()")

Rough ceilings if you must guess: simple HTML 2–3s, typical SPA 5–6s, heavy SPA (Google Scholar, LinkedIn feed, Anthropic docs) 8–10s.

Back / forward

navigate_back(tab_id?)     # history.back()
navigate_forward(tab_id?)  # history.forward()

Useful for OAuth callbacks, pagination that uses pushState, wizard flows that retain state on back. If the page was loaded via navigate then submitted a form, navigate_back returns to the pre-submit form with field values preserved (in most cases).

Multi-tab orchestration

Parallelism in chrome-bridge is per-tab: requests to different tabs run concurrently, requests to the same tab are queued. Use tabs to parallelize.

a = tabs_create(url='https://news.ycombinator.com').id
b = tabs_create(url='https://lobste.rs').id
c = tabs_create(url='https://techmeme.com').id
# Wait until all three are ready (poll readyState on each, or just sleep ~4s)

page_markdown(tab_id=a)   # these three run in parallel
page_markdown(tab_id=b)
page_markdown(tab_id=c)

tabs_close(a); tabs_close(b); tabs_close(c)

Rules of thumb

• Keep concurrency at 3–5 tabs. Beyond that Chrome swaps and everything slows.
• Close each tab as soon as you're done with it, not at the end of the session.
• The bridge always keeps at least one about:blank tab alive — don't worry about closing "the last" tab.

Background tabs may not fully render

Tabs created with active=false (or that were never foregrounded) can return empty title, empty url, and unrendered DOM. If dom_query or page_* calls come back suspiciously empty:

action('tabs.update', { tabId: N, active: true })
# wait ~2–3s for the page to finish painting

Then retry the extraction.

Common patterns

Confirm you actually landed on the page you asked for:

navigate(url='https://example.com/article')
# ... wait for ready ...
current = execute_script(code="(()=>location.href)()")
if current != 'https://example.com/article':
    # maybe a consent redirect or geo block — investigate

Reload when content is stale:

tabs_reload(tab_id=N)
# wait for ready, then re-extract

Open a sibling tab from the current one (preserves history if useful):

tabs_duplicate(tab_id=N)
# then navigate the duplicate somewhere else

Common failures