Open a Web Page

To open a new web page, you can use the tabs module:

var tabs = require("sdk/tabs");
tabs.open("https://www.example.com");

This function is asynchronous, so you don't immediately get back a tab object which you can examine. To do this, pass a callback function into open(). The callback is assigned to the onReady property, and will be passed the tab as an argument:

var tabs = require("sdk/tabs");
tabs.open({
  url: "https://www.example.com",
  onReady: function onReady(tab) {
    console.log(tab.title);
  }
});

Even then, you don't get direct access to any content hosted in the tab.

To access tab content you need to attach a script to the tab using tab.attach(). This add-on loads a page, then attaches a script to the page which adds a red border to it:

var tabs = require("sdk/tabs");
tabs.open({
  url: "https://www.example.com",
  onReady: runScript
});
 
function runScript(tab) {
  tab.attach({
    contentScript: "document.body.style.border = '5px solid red';"
  });
}

Learning More

To learn more about working with tabs in the SDK, see the tabs API reference.

To learn more about running scripts in tabs, see the tutorial on using tab.attach().