How to hide an extension's Browser Action icon programmatically in a popup.html?

Question

If we right click on an extension's Browser Action icon and choose Hide button,the icon will be hidden but the extension will still work.So can we make this programmatically? (with some javascript in the popup.html ?)

btw:I don't want using a page action instead of a browser action cuz the popup page provide some informations and hiding it or not should be decided by users.

Answer 1

Currently it's not possible to programatically hide the browser action button.
There's a feature request to implement this feature through the chrome.management API, star it at https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=260281 if you want to get notified of updates.