Making a Chrome Extension download a file

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Fast-forward 3 years, and now Google Chrome offers chrome.downloads API (since Chrome 31).

After declaring "downloads" permission in the manifest, one can initiate a download with this call:

chrome.downloads.download({
  url: "http://your.url/to/download",
  filename: "suggested/filename/with/relative.path" // Optional
});

If you want to generate the file content in the script, you can use Blob and URL APIs, e.g.:

var blob = new Blob(["array of", " parts of ", "text file"], {type: "text/plain"});
var url = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
chrome.downloads.download({
  url: url // The object URL can be used as download URL
  //...
});

For more options (i.e. Save As dialog, overwriting existing files, etc.), see the documentation.

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