Gibber-gabber
Add-ons coming for Google Chrome (soon?)
beingzoe over 2 years ago

I’ve been saying for a while, despite being an ardent fan of Firefox, Google Chrome is amazing but missing extension support is a deal breaker. Google Chrome is fast, runs smoothly, and feels good. Not to mention the improved use of screen real estate that caused me to make my Firefox look like Chrome. But I can’t live without Firebug or AdBlock+.

At the web 2.0 expo (September 2008) Google engineer Ojan Vafai stated during a panel roundtable that Chrome would indeed support extensions (add-ons). He expressed concerns about stability throwing jabs at Firefox and Internet Explorer.

However, Google Chrome is now 1 year old and it looks like add-ons might be just over the horizon. Earlier this week Google turned on extension support in Chrome for development releases of the browser. This means that anyone who wants to develop extensions can download the “test” version of Google Chrome if you will, and start developing/porting their own add-ons (AdBlock+ anyone?).

From the Chromium development blog:

Good news for extension developers: as of today, extensions are turned on by default on Google Chrome’s dev channel…We’ve been working on enabling extensions for a while, but until now, they were hidden behind a developer flag…Removing the flag is the first step in our launch process, and it means we’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions, the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel…Going forward, we are working hard towards a release on the Beta Channel.

And if the developers are building programming add-ons for Chrome, it can’t be long before the stable release (public download) of Chrome is able to use them.

Here’s to hoping.