It occurred to me that I never blogged about my Source Quicklinks extension (source). I created it back in 2010, when I started working on the Chrome team, focusing on the WebKit side of things. I was spending a lot of time in Code Search trying to understand how things worked. Chromium's code search instance searches not just the Chromium repository itself, but also all its dependencies (WebKit, V8, Skia, etc.). A lot of times the only way to understand a piece of code was to look at the commit that added it (especially in WebKit code, where comments are scarce but the bug associated with the commit often provides the back story). I was therefore doing a lot of URL mangling to go from Code Search results to Trac pages that had "blame" (annotation) views.

The extension made this process easier, adding a page action that provides back and forth links between Code Search, the Chromium repository (both the ViewVC and the Gitweb sites), WebKit's Trac setup and V8. Later, when the omnibox API became available, it also gained a "sql" search shortcut for the Chromium repository and commits.

Though I no longer work on Chrome, I still find myself going through those code bases quite often. For example, the best way to know whether something triggers layout in Blink/WebKit is by reading the code. I've therefore revved the extension to handle the Blink fork, in addition to cleaning up some other things that had started to bitrot. I also attempted to add cross-links between the WebKit and Blink repositories that takes into account the Blink reorganization, though we'll see how useful that ends up being as the codebases diverge more and more.