thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

Does Chrome Only Have “Perceived” Speed Superiority?

Posted on 18. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

It was brought to my attention today that another intrepid blogger has taken a highly technical view on the Firefox versus Chrome debate. Since we’ve put up articles and videos directly related to this topic, it seems that we should give these thoughts a fair view here. The contention here is whether Chrome is really that fast, or if it is simply a perception from its user interface.

Here are some graphs and videos, check out the link to get more information on the terminology. I learned a lot from this post, and here’s hoping that you do too.

Adobe PDF Files Now Integrated into Chromium

Posted on 17. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

How will Apple combat the PDF on the web? They have already said that they won’t support Flash, and Adobe has since slowly backed away from support for anything related to Apple. It’s a smart move on Adobe’s part, and gives Google a chance to move in on the vacant space.

The Chromium Blog has just posted a bit about PDF files now being integrated into the browser. This is something I had expected to happen with the advent of Adobe’s Flash player being baked into Chrome, and this is a logical step forward since these files are ubiquitous on the web. At the forefront of this move are issues with security. There have been problems (and McAfee has pointed them out) with suspect PDF files causing havoc on machines.

In the Computerworld article linked above, a McAfee security specialist recommended sandboxing Adobe Reader files, something that is now being done by the Chromium team to further enhance Chrome’s overall security in the future.

With Google supporting Adobe’s formats (OK, two of them) they legitimize them on the web. There’s nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that they are tacking a stance that further differentiates them from Apple. It seems only logical to think that with Flash already being in the fold that supporting Adobe Reader’s PDF file format to be complementary to what has already been done with integration. Despite Apple’s concern everyone uses Flash and Reader so instead of chucking it out, why not find ways to solve the problem at hand?

At the same time, what is wrong with simply integrating PDF files into the web the way it’s done with Srcibd? This may just be another move for Google to pre-empt that company, just like purchasing YouTube gave them the defacto platform for video. Integrating PDF files gives Google the platform for enabling documentation that may have all sorts of importance to people that want to publish on the web yet still retain some degree of control.

This is starting in Chromium with the dev build, and surely will soon move to the beta and stable releases of Chrome.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/6/10

Posted on 06. Jun, 2010 by Greg Farnum.

Google axes Windows, saves millions.

Extension tips: Syncing notes across multiple computers with Chrome Notepad.

iPad rivals at Computex favor Android. 

Chrome extension opens PDFs and PowerPoint with Google Docs.

Video: Google Executive Talks Chrome, Chrome OS

Posted on 02. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai was featured at a Google press conference held at Computex today. I got a chance to film many of the questions that were asked, as well as ask some of my own regarding Chrome OS.

More Chromium and Chrome OS information to come. Follow us on Twitter and/or via our RSS feed for the latest updates from Computex.

How Chrome to Phone Works

Posted on 23. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

As demonstrated in the first day of the Google I/O conference, further integration between Android and other Google offerings is going to be one of the most tantalizing developments coming up in the next year along with Google TV. The ability to be able to seamlessly move information from Chrome to your Android-enabled device is going to be really useful, plus the fact that developers are going to be able to use this feature to come up with some interesting applications.

The key underpinning to how Chrome to phone works is by utilizing yet another technology that was shown off at I/O called the Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) Framework. First, a user must install the Chrome extension and respective Android application. What this will do is notify the Android application that user data being pushed from Chrome browser that is now stored in the cloud is available for download. This will work great for pushing small amounts of data to a user’s phone such as links containing maps or other websites, as well as messages.

This appears to possibly be the way that Android devices will be able to stream content that resides on a PC such as music to phones that was demonstrated at I/O. The way that will be done is through another application, provided by a company called Simplify Media that Google acquired not too long ago for an undisclosed amount. It sounds as if that will be a more complex process (much more data) if Google bought another company to provide the technology to make streaming happen from device to device, but it shows the potential of what this type of integration can provide for in the future.

Bottom line? It will be great to have things that can be sent from Chrome browser to Android phones, although I would suspect at some point that the browser itself would need to be added to future versions of Android. It was clear during the Day One Keynote that Android browser is still on the mobile operating system, although a recent version of V8 that Chrome uses is integrated on Froyo.

Also, when will users be able to send snippets of data from their phones to their PCs, utilizing this service in the opposite direction?

thechromesource Daily: Links for 4/29/10

Posted on 29. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

The Graphic Mac has an article that runs down the various browsers available for Mac, saying they all suck expect for Chrome.

Synaptics has issued a press release for its Guesture Suite multi-touch features that will be coming for Linux and Chrome OS.

One of our partnership blogs, ChromeOS-Blog.com, has posted up a new “spring release” of Chrome OS for download.

The Google Apps Engine Blog has an interview with Jay Kyburz, who developed the web-based strategy game Neptune’s Pride.

Google has purchased Labpixies, which is an app publisher that primarily develops personalizations for iGoogle.

The Google Code Blog has case study guest post talking about what HTML5 can do for the development of mobile applications.

Googlers Bring Quake II to the Browser

Posted on 03. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

A lot of good comes from allowing Google employees to spend twenty percent of their time at work on projects that they want to pursue. A case in point would be this video, which shows Quake II being run in Safari at a rate that must hover around thrity frames per second to look so good. the engine running this is WebGL and HTML5:

It must be nice to be on serious projects like this at work.

More info on the project:

Quake II to the browser.

In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 <audio> elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.

The port is based on the Jake2 project, compiled to Javascript using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Jake 2 is a Java port of the original Quake II source code, which was open sourced by id software.

To make the Jake 2 code work with GWT, we have

• Created a new WebGL based renderer
• Ported the network layer for multiplayer games from UDP to the WebSocket API
• Made all resource loading calls asynchronous
• Created a GWT implementation of Java nio buffers based on WebGL arrays (to be ported to ECMAScript Typed Arrays)
• Implemented a simple file system emulation for saving games and preferences using the Web Storage API

Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser

Posted on 28. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Many who use Chrome Browser do not even realize that in itself it has a Task Manager, much like the one that the future Chrome operating system will eventually use. But why would a browser have a Task Manager? Well, Chrome operates a bit differently that other browsers. Instead of occupying one process that takes a huge amount of system memory, Chrome separates tabs as single processes. This is different, yet has some ingenuity to it.

One of the reasons for this is because of security. Being able to lock down each tab as a single process ensures that malware or spyware does not have as much capability to infect the entire browser or system. Another reason is stability. Many of you have probably experienced a crash in Chrome, but that crash only affected a certain tab because it is set up as its own “sandboxed” process.

I could go on with the virtues of this, but let’s just take a look at Task Manager. While in Chrome, go ahead and hit Shift+Esc and you’ll see something like this:

I’ve expanded this out just to show everything here. It’s easy to tell that I like to have a lot of tabs open; the reality is that I do the majority of my work within the browser environment – so you can understand why I may be interested in Chrome OS. Anyways you can see here that every window I have open is in is own separate process. Should you have the desire, or are dealing with a buggy/unresponsive tab, you can kill it by highlighting one of the tabs and hitting “End Process”.

Even as a browser, Chrome is like an operating system in and of itself. If you look on the bottom left hand side you can see that I have highlighted the “Stats for nerds” link. When you click on this, you get a tab that expands upon the initial window:

Note how from here you can get detailed names for each process, whether they are a tab or and extension and the process ID. On the right hand side there are corresponding columns that give you memory information:

You can see what amount of memory a tab is using on its own, as well as what is shared, and the entire total. You can also see what kind of virtual memory a process is using. This has been well thought out with developers in mind and the fact that this is in the browser shows that the Google folks have been prepping this for the operating system environment for some time. Also, being able to drill down like this offers an element of information and security that no other browser has to offer.

One interesting thing I would like to note is the amount of memory that Flash requires to run. Sure, its being used in some of the pages I have open (YouTube), but you can see now that Google wants to go the operating system route why they want to move to open standards to replace Flash:

Compare that with the other processes I have running above and it’s clear – Flash is a resource hog. And with more media and interactivity on the way, expect to see more third party plugins as well as some Chrome extensions get scrutinized. With this task manager it is much easier to break down particular processes in a browser as opposed to the way other browsers simply lump everything into on giant memory allocation on a system.

So bust out the task manager when you get a chance. You might learn something interesting about the memory that pages you go to on a day to day basis require from your system. That goes the same for plugins and extensions as well.

Video: A Look at the UI Concepts for Chrome and its Extensions

Posted on 10. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Extensions that now run in Chrome browser could easily be labeled as applications themselves, and in the near future I’m pretty sure that’s what they will be. It will be especially true when you consider that Chrome OS will run next to every program for users native to the browser itself. With applications really being the focus of an operating system, it’s important that all the parts work together right and give an experience that a user wants to come back to. Although making a device work is part of the goal,  speed and simplicity help in terms of making a better UI than what is currently available:

As the clip also talks about, customization for users is also going to be key. For example, you can create extensions that provide HTML-based popups, yet do not create another tab in the main screen which could seem obtrusive. Towards the end of the video there is an example of what is really exciting about having extensions and people developing interesting new apps for this platform because of the potential to make more interactive content.

There are a lot of offical Google resources out there for getting started developing an extension. The best part about learning about this early is that an extension for the browser will be able to be used in the operating system when it is released.

Paper: Browser Extensions Have Potential Security Implications

Posted on 09. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

In a comprehensive paper that was recently published, researchers at Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science studied the possible security impact that extensions could have on a browsers’ vulnerability to exploit and/or attack a computer. It was found that of twenty-five popular Firefox Extensions, all of them had the highest level of security privileges in the browser. That’s all that would theoretically be needed to attack a machine, which could potentially result in a compromised situation.

The paper also goes on to explain that the majority of extensions don’t need to have these types of privileges in order to execute what a developer  is trying to accoplish, but that the Firefox API as it is currently is built to allow for powerful networked software development – even for extensions.

The group who wrote this paper has even worked with Google in order to better implement their own extensions directory. They proposed to Google a method whereby keys are used to help identify an extension. Developers must sign an agreement with Google to ensure that privileges for an extension do not have capabilites that allow for potential security problems before they can be listed at the official directory.

When installing extensions from the Google directory, which was launched last December, I had noticed a few times that the the URL for the location of the download was a bit unique:

This is by design, however. It’s a public key that has been set that identifies the extension with the website. The best part about this is that for the purposes of version updating, the key is identified with the extension and thus the URL that is located on the Google extension directory. This is in addition to scripts running separately from outside web sources and some other interesting features that offer a robust technical standard for these additional features of Chrome browser that independent developers are working on.

While Firefox offers a rating system that works to protect users, as well as a developmental system called Jetpack that offers narrow interfaces, I really got the impression that there was a lot of thought that was put into the extension system for Chrome. While trying to expose vulnerabilities through extensions doesn’t appear to be something that is deliberate by those who create them, there is potential for there to be problems down the line.

It’s also important to consider that if you plan on using extensions, you should probably use an official directory depending on the browser that you use. That means getting them from Mozilla.org for Firefox or the official Google extensions site for Chrome. I could not find an extension/add-in directory for Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome are discussed in the paper in depth. Now that there is so much more that you can do with a browser with the speed of JavaScript performance increasing at such a huge rate over the past few years it has to be considered that browsers need to increasingly become more secure as they become more that just where you surf the web but also where you run applications. So it’s worth a read if you have time, and you can check out the abstract from here.

Video: Browser Comparison Test

Posted on 08. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Ah, so what is the best browser? If you look at this through the lense of Ian Hickson’s Acid Tests, which gives you a score based on how compliant your browser is with today’s web standards, one can get a good sense of what is good today and what isn’t. Plus, what is a Monday morning without a good video clip to keep you going:

I don’t have much to say about this, other than how horribly Internet Explorer 8 failed the test, but what are you gonna do?

Review: Twitter Reactions Extension

Posted on 07. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

As if comments on a post were not good enough, the reality is that Twitter is also an enormously important aspect of social media. With the Twitter Reactions Extension, you can see what people are opining about on a particular website – drilled down to a specific page. I could write a lot of words about this, but it is proabaly best if I just post a video on the topic:

Now, I could harp on the values of Twitter, and some wonder how they will ever be able to make money as business, but they are not going away. With extensions like Chromed Bird and now this, expect to see more utilizations of Twitter on the horizon for both Chrome browser, and eventually Chrome OS.

For those who have been overseas, you know that Asian countries thrive on SMS text messages. Believe it or not, 140 characters go a long way, and the advertising revenue can be significant. I would expect to see more developments in this spectre very soon. Twitter, in my esteemed opinion (and that’s not saying much) has a viable business.

So much so that they use Amazon’s Web Services to deal with the constant flow of traffic. Don’t think so? Look in the bottom of your browser the next time you’re checking out Tweets.

Ubuntu Now Calls Google Docs the Standard

Posted on 07. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Ever used OpenOffice? I remember submitting a document once using the open format, only to find that the person I sent it to could not open it in Microsoft Word. That pretty much killed the deal for me, but a surprising development for users of Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly known as Ubuntu Netbook Remix) is that no longer is OpenOffice their defacto productivity suite, as the powers-that be for the Linux OS built with netbooks in mind is replacing it with Google Docs.

There’s no question about Google Docs’ importance in the software scene. They have captured a pretty big audience, even getting play as not only Google’s own corporate standard for a Microsoft Office replacement, but they have also gotten Genetech on board and almost all of the 16,000 people who work there use the Premium Edition of Google Docs for all of their work. This is interesting to note since for the Premium Edition Google charges a $50 licensing fee for each user.

Microsoft must be feeling a little weak in the knees over this. There was once a time where if you used one Microsoft solution, the common thinking was that you would use many other offerings that they had. Now that Google plans on releasing their own operating system, further promoted by Google Chrome’s emergence in the browser market, anything that they can offer in terms of applications has the potential to be successful. Just as long as they offer a solution that is just as good as their competitors, mind you.

You can check out Google Docs right here.

Things To Do Extension Can Keep You Focused

Posted on 06. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

I rarely ever use the default Chrome homepage that is set up. Basically, it gives you the eight most popular sites that you use, a listing of recently closed tabs and a row of bookmarks that line the top of the window. When I am opening up a new tab, it’s generally because I’m inspired to find some information and I want to get to a website as fast as possible.

Looking for a way to better prioritize my work, I was searching for an extension or app that would be effective in putting together a list of things I need to get done. Fortunately, someone has already thought of this by creating the Things To Do Extension. Instead of every time you open Chrome or a new tab within the browser and seeing the default favorites page, you can have a reminder that yes, you do have stuff that needs to get done:

From the options menu, Things To Do is fairly customizable. You can change the color of the background in case you need a bright reminder of what needs to get done. You can modify the font in several different ways – type, size and color. But in terms of simplicity, all that needs to be done to make this extension work for you is fill it with the most important things you need to do. That will help you get them done, since you can’t avoid seeing them every time you venture to another place on the internet.

You can download Things To Do from the Google Extensions site.

Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Ian Hickson has worked as a proponent of web standards for years. He is the maintainer of the Acid Tests website, which is a tool for browsers to make sure that they are fully compliant with today’s web standards. The most recent revision, Acid3, was developed to help browsers follow standards compliance with web 2.0 technologies.

Ian has been employed by Netscape, Opera Software, and now works for Google. He also was the lead on authoring the standards for HTML5. While he couldn’t talk about anything related to Chrome or Google with us, he answered our questions so that we can better understand this new web standard a bit better.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involed in HTML 5.

I was at Opera in 2003, working half in QA and half in their standards group, when the W3C called for a member vote on XForms (at that time the next generation of web forms, see here). Opera and some other companies — Apple and Mozilla in particular, though we were supported by some others also — tried to make the point that abandoning HTML wasn’t such a hot idea, and so we decided to write a proof of concept to show that it was possible to add many of the features of XForms to HTML. I happened to have some free time so I was volunteered to write it. We called it XForms Basic or something like that, and it wasn’t very popular at the W3C, so we lost the vote. However, it convinced us that it was the right direction to go in, so we worked on it a bit more, and renamed it to Web Forms 2.0 to avoid confusion with XForms.

In 2004 there was a big workshop organised by the W3C to Make a Decision about how we were going to move forward on the Web, and the W3C staff and many of the members voted for continuing down the path of XHTML2 and XForms, and said that if we wanted to work on HTML we should do so elsewhere, because the W3C had decided it was done with that.

So we opened a mailing list called the WHATWG to continue work on Web Forms 2.0 in public, and later that year started a new draft called Web Applications 1.0 into which we put many features aimed at writing Web apps, including a new version of HTML that we jokingly called HTML5, and a bunch of other features that later became Web Storage, Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, and a variety of other specs.

Around 2005 I moved from Opera to Google, so that I could focus specifically on the spec work — Opera still wanted me to work 50% on QA, but Google were willing to let me work 100% on the specs.

Later, around 2006 or 2007, the W3C basically realised they had made a mistake, and they asked if they could work on HTML5 as well, so we renamed Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5, and the WHATWG and the W3C started working together. Web Forms 2.0 got merged into HTML5, and most of the bits of HTML5 that weren’t really HTML got split out into separate specs.

How far along is this technology? As in, when can users expect to see this on a regular basis?

Many parts of it were done before we started, because we took existing proprietary features and just specified them. For example, XMLHttpRequest was first specified in Web Applications 1.0, years after Microsoft invented it and all the other browsers copied it. It was later spun off into its own spec at the W3C. Other parts are brand new, and haven’t been implemented anywhere yet. Some parts might never get implemented, and we’ll throw them out when that becomes clear.

People are starting to use parts of HTML5 today. It depends really on what fraction of browsers you want to target. If you only care about Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can use the “canvas” element today without any trouble… but IE doesn’t support it. If you only care about IE, you can use onhashchange… but the other browsers don’t support it. I would give it a few years before the majority of the features are implemented everywhere, but who knows. After all, not everything in HTML_4_ is implemented everywhere yet, and people use that without even thinking about it!

How significant is the canvas tag and svg for HTML 5? Do you know of any good examples of this on the web right now?

IE doesn’t support this either, so it’s hard to find widely deployed uses of those, but there are some. Yahoo! Pipes has used it  for some time. Dreamhost uses it in their hosting panel.

Talk a bit about how offline storage will work. Many users are concerned about being able to work offline.

The Offline Application Cache feature is actually pretty straight-forward. If you design your application such that it can work without contacting the server, then you just list all the files it uses (HTML pages, CSS, JS, images, etc) in a manifest using a simple format, and it works offline. The way it works is the first time you visit the page, it gets the manifest, downloads all the files, and the next time you visit the page, it just uses the downloaded files, regardless of whether you’re online or not – it then downloads the new files in the background, in case they have been updated. This makes things faster as well as making them work offline. If your application uses online data, though, like a Web mail application, you will have to do extra work to actually maintain an offline copy of the mail for the user, that’s not handled by the page.

Have you heard anything about 3D on the web? Will HTML 5 support this?

The Khronos Group is working on a 3D canvas context, but I don’t know much about it. Canvas is a part of HTML5.

Lastly, what is in store for the future when talking about HTML 5 on the web?

From the point of view of standards, HTML5 is old hat now! The WHATWG is already moving on to the next generation of HTML. One of the changes we’re making is that we’re no longer numbering the versions… in practice it hasn’t made much sense. Browsers started implementing HTML”5″ stuff before all the HTML”4″ stuff was implemented, and they ship whatever they have at the time they ship… it’s not like the version numbers really mean anything useful. So there’s just “HTML”, and we keep improving it.

One of the ideas we’re looking at is video-conferencing, but it needs a common codec even more than , so we’re kinda stuck with that. It’s also not clear how we should do the networking — there are lots of standards like SIP and Jingle that we could use, but they’re all really complicated, and not a good fit for what we’re doing.

On the nearer term, we’re going through all the feedback we’ve been getting on HTML5, and fixing bugs. There’s lots of work still to be done.

Google Pushing HTML5 for the Future

Posted on 04. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

A post on the the Chromium blog today touts the array of developer tools that are available from Google for the many open source projects that the company is working on. One campaign in particular is a touring developer conference called Google Developer Day in which some of the largest projects are presented – namely Android and Chrome, which ultimately benefits the operating system project in getting developers on board early.

A important standard that Google is working on is HTML5. Previously, complex web applications and offline storage capabilities were fueled in Chrome by Google Gears (Firefox and IE add-ins available here), but this will soon be no more. Now, Google wants to push HTML5 to the forefront, most noteably in its testing of YouTube for the eventual site- wide adoption of HTML5 instead of the current video playing technology, Adobe Flash.

Why the desire to move away from proprietary formats and use an open standard such as HTML5? Consider this web-based image uploader tool developed by Mozilla Hacks, which is developed in HTML5  and offers image editing and offline functionality within the browser:

In addition to this, HTML5 will offer the ability to directly embed video and audio onto a webpage, offer more interactivity using the canvas tag and svg files as well as simply creating a richer environment for users. To learn more about HTML5 and some code examples, I would recommend checking out this video with Brad Neuberg, who is a developer and is part of the Open Web Advocacy group with Google:

w3schools: Chrome Has Surpassed Ten Percent Share

Posted on 04. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

The web developer-focused w3schools releases browser statistics every month. Recently, they published their figures for January. Fueled by the movement of Chrome 4 into a stable version along with the increased media coverage of Chrome OS and Google’s competition with the other tech titans, Chrome has moved past the ten percent share mark, registering a 10.8% share which is up a solid point from December, at 9.8%.

Mind you, w3schools.com is not any sort of official standard for browser usage. However, the 9 million monthly users of the site are forward-thinking technologically minded people who are using the site to find the latest and greatest in terms of web development resources. With that being said, there is no doubt that w3schools caters more towards early adopters of technology, but the fact that Chrome browser is now in use for over ten percent of those looking for web development resources shows that some other browsers are going to begin to slowly get sqeezed out of their share of the market.

And to make sure  that these are not the only statistics for this article, Netmarketshare is reporting that Chrome browser usage is at 5.22% in January, up from 4.63% in December. These stats are supposedly representative for the entire web, although there must be some give or take considering the web’s global audience. Regardless, you can read about their methodology for measuring stats here.

For January, thechromesource had 44.1% that used Firefox, 34.5% users with Chrome,  9% with Safari and 6.6% with Internet Explorer.

Linux Chrome 5 Beta is a Go

Posted on 03. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Although Chrome 5 Beta has been available for those using Windows and Mac for a little while already, Google held back its release of the Linux version of their beta browser. That’s no surprise, as the initial developer version of Chrome for Linux users has only been out since June and has a much smaller user base than the other two platforms. Regardless, Google announced yesterday that the 5.0.307.1 Beta for Linux is now available.

Some of the new features being released with this version include support for notifications, a different directory for loading plugins and improved text support for various languages.

It’s important that Google keeps the Chrome browser for Linux up to speed with Windows and Mac. An ever-increasing amount of users are turning to open source, and all of the solid OSs are based on Linux. In terms of netbook operating systems, platforms such as Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Moblin and Jolicloud are all based on Linux. This helps drive the cost of netbooks lower, as these OSs save money on the overall product price when compared to Microsoft’s licensing fees that are required for every device that ships with Windows.

At the same time, when Google eventually comes out with Chrome OS, it will be essentially competing with these machines, but will still have a leg up on overall browser competition because Linux does not support the closed-source Internet Explorer. Opera and Firefox currently are some of the most popular browsers for Linux. Safari is also available as well.

You can get Linux Chrome 5 Beta from the download page here.

The Top 5 Indispensable Chrome Extensions

Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Some people find that extensions (also known as add-ins if you’re a Firefox user) to end up being meaningless bloat that simply slows down the perofrmance of their browser. But I beg to differ. Chrome has some plugins that can seriously change your web browsing experiences, and while some of these extensions are available in other browsers, the speed with the which these run along with the browsing experience differentiates Chrome from its comeptition. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little competitive drive in order to further progress technology.

1. Google Translate – We do live in a global world, and at this point language should no longer be a barrier to information access. That is essentially what this extension does. Instead of copying and pasting text into babelfish – which is what I used to do for translation – I can now click on a icon in the top of my browser and get a translation into English. No, it’s not always perfect but it does the job better than any other free translation tool out there.

2. Chromed Bird - While subjective to whether or not you use Twitter, but for those who do, Chromed Bird allows you to essentially eliminate a browser tab by having an extension that is able to keep you up to date on the latest tweets. You’re able to use this to send out messages as well as get pop-ups when you are replied to or retweeted. This is excellent for the power Twitter user.

3. Google Mail Checker Plus – This is an awesome extension for those who obsessively check their email; let’s just hope for the sake of this extension that you use Gmail. Installed as an icon in your browser, Google Mail Checker Plus will let you know if you have any new messages. It also allows you to reply, delete and compose new messages all from whatever browser window you may be in. So you can write that quick email on the fly, should you be inspired to.

4. RSS Subscription Extension – It’s great that every major site for information has an RSS feed, but it can only be useful if I am able to organize that information into my RSS reader so that I can be updated in real time the latest news and other goings-on around the web. That’s why the RSS Subscription Extension is so useful to me. When a site has a feed that is available, there is an RSS icon that is displayed in my address bar. I simply click on it and I am whisked over to the RSS reader of my choice for saving the feed. Pretty useful, and if you have never really got into RSS feeds, this extension helps out a lot.

5. TabJump – Ever experience tab-madness? If you have, then you should try Tabjump. Neatly placed in your navigation bar, TabJump allows you to better interpret the mass amount of tabs that come with modern browsing. You are able to look at full descriptions of the tabs you are looking at, plus they are also grouped as related topics. You can also reopen recently closed tabs, which often happens in mass ordeals when your system memory starts to freak out because of all the Chrome instances you have open.

Did I leave out your favorite extension that make Chrome the best browser to use or has changed your experience using the internet? Let us know.