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Google Chrome 4.0 with Extensions-Its just the beginning

I was looking through the browser stats at the W3schools for the past year and the trend clearly shows an upbeat for Chrome. Chrome released their new 4.0 stable builds and they opened the extension gallery officially with this post here (Head over and catch up with some cool extensions 🙂 ).  With the launch of extension support and extension gallery the stats are only going to better. Well Firefox also did launch a major update the last week moving to gecko 1.9.2 with support for Personas and few other updates but still not a major upgrade

The competition is interesting and still is going to get better this year especially with IE 9 and Firefox 4.0 coming up in the next  quarters. I am more of a Web kit guy and I would still bet on Chrome gaining more market share.  In 2007,when safari got introduced to the windows, i was simply mesmerized with the the font rendering (really miss that on chrome) and the speed of it. I found Weskit to be the culprit behind safari’s elegance.  In Sep 2008 Google created that open community to take Weskit to the place it deserved and a year and half clearly shows the true potential of the rendering engine.

To my understanding what will win in the future of these browser wars is completely based on the potential of the rendering engine and  community they have around them. Firefox  has a big one and Chrome is catching up with them.  IE can file as many patents as they want, but they wont survive long until they help the web with some open standards. Clearly my bet is on chrome, who would you bet on?

Update:- Now Google adds support for GreaseMonkey Scripts which makes Google Chrome take Firefox head on.  read more about the grease monkey script here.  Here is a similar story from Mashable confirming that chrome is indeed stealing market share like i noted above, only that they didn’t take sides on the future about who will win.( o yeah we the users will win 🙂 )

Chrome-3.0 & Extensions

On 8th July  Google announced officially on its blog that a chrome OS is under development and will be available in the market from mid next year, though you can still get the source code’s starting this year end. The news is all over the blogosphere and twitter. Well few days back, Google silently launched the 3.0 version of the chrome browser on the chrome dev. channel. This did not have the hype as what Chrome Os has even before its release has, but it didn’t miss my attention as well.

So what’s hot in this 3.0 version of the release?  The latest builds support extensions, has a customizable new tab page and a lot of other bug fixes under the hood. Extensions is really an awesome feature that everybody has been longing for on Chrome. I have posted some screenshots of the latest build with some extensions, so that you could have a sneak preview.

 Newtab

The New tab page, with the customizable UI, to pin your most visited websites in the thumbnail view. Still waiting for that tips & suggestions to populate.

 

Newtab2 A screen shot of the new tab page in list view.

Newtab3  My installed extensions (chritter and gmail checker)are visible on the status bar( they call it the tool strip)

Extension screen1

My chrome extension screen shows the extensions that i am using currently. (Don’t be scared by the error, its just that i deleted something i was trying)

Now that you have an idea as to what it looks like, try it out your self. It would be unfair if I wouldn’t post links to the site where i got to read through and try the extensions. So here they go..

Firstly head over to the HOW TO page. Once you are done the  the basics you can try these suggested extension samples from here. Do make sure you have the latest build from here or you are on the dev channel subscribing to the latest builds.

The extensions that i use on chrome are listed below. I have linked the original  site incase you wanna try

  1. Adsweep – removes adds. This one gets a 5 star from me.
  2. Cleeki  an interesting and a MUST try extension its very much like IE 8 Accelerators, in fact you can use all the IE 8 accelerators with chrome from here.
  3. Chritter – the twitter extension that shows the last tweet of all the folks you are following.
  4. Gmail Checker– displays unread mail count.
  5. Rss subscription– finally you can see the feed icon on the URL bar.

If you are interested in Google page rank you can try this extension here.

Well there’s lot more to be done on the extensions development and their periodic updates etc, so far I am enjoying all the extensions i tried. Incase you know something i haven’t tried, do let me know i would be excited to try them.

Chrome hasn’t dropped me, and am already getting addicted to chrome. With such rapid development on chrome, Firefox has a lot of challenges coming ahead.  Well that’s really healthy for the web..What do you think?