I have searched high and low for this but whatever i do this simply does not seem to work. I have a google chrome extension which send an XHR request using a background.js file. Now my requirement is that i need to show a small loading icon while the xhr request is proceeding. Are there any tutorials out there which explains how to do this. I have tried an iframe but it looks ugly when it expands as the entire popup.html expands. Is jquery my only option here because that would mean adding a lot of size to my current project just for a simple animation.