Google Chrome gets initial support for browser extensions

Google Chrome may be one of the fastest web browsers around in terms of launch speeds and page loading. But there's one thing that Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and other browsers have that Google hasn't had - until now: support for plugins, add-ons, extensions, or whatever else you want to call them.

But now the folks behind Chrome have created a way to wrap JavaScript files that alter the way you interact with web sites into extensions for Chrome.

Right now, extension support is still pretty clunky. You'll need to have Google Chrome 2.0 beta or a recent developer build installed to use extensions. Then you'll have to download and unzip the file to a directory like "c:\myextension" and append the following line to the target properties of your Google Chrome shortcut:

--enable-extensions --load-extension="c:\myextension"

Once that's done, you can use the extension. There's a sample extension available at the bottom of the Google tutorial. Once you've installed it, visit www.google.com to see what it does. You'll probably be quite undewhelmed.

Hopefully we'll see more impressive extensions soon - and an easier way to install and run them,

[via Google Operating System]

Tags: extensions, google-chrome, javascript, userscripts