Google Chrome may be the best browser on the market. It’s faster and more stable than Firefox and today began opening up to user modification with the availability of more than 300 browser extensions. Official Mac and Linux versions were just made available today as well.
Can Chrome remain so much stronger than Firefox once a pile of extensions or added on? That’s the question and now is your chance to start finding out the answer. It’s been more than a year since Google launched Chrome, but today is a big day for the browser.
The one bit of bad news is that neither the official Mac version nor the developer version we’ve been testing for months – called Chromium – are allowed to install extensions from the official extension directory. You can, however, get a good view of the breadth of extensions available, and many extensions have links to their developer sites where you can find Mac installs unencumbered. You should probably just install Chromium, savvy readers. If you’re on a Mac, download this app that TechCrunch made to easily upgrade your developer install with just a click at any time.
In the mean time, the independent site ChromeExtensions.org remains a great place to find extensions for your browser. The site is crawling right now, though.
I’m currently using GleeBox, TooManyTabs and Glue. How about you?
If you haven’t tried Chrome yet, you really should. Poor little Firefox is a great community project and has done wonders for the web, but it’s grown bloated and slow over the years. Chrome was built with web applications, not pages, in mind. It runs separate processes in each tab so one tab can’t drag down or crash the others. The latest builds of Chromium for Mac are outperforming Firefox with Javascript (key for responsiveness) by up to 10 times. In other words, Chrome runs circles around Firefox. It makes us sad, but most of the ReadWriteWeb staff now runs Chrome or Chromium and we’ve been on the edge of our seats for the launch of extensions.
Now we’ll see how a Chrome loaded down with extensions can do. Google says it shouldn’t be a problem: “Chromium’s extensive performance monitoring infrastructure has helped us ensure extensions affect Google Chrome’s speed as little as possible.”
