The extension development for the Google Chrome browser is slowly taking up speed. While there is still no option to use extensions in the latest public release of the Google browser the developers are slowly improving the capabilities of the extensions manager. The latest dev builds of the web browser support extensions right out of the box without having to supply startup parameters as it was previously required. It is generally expected that extension development will really take off when the public releases of the browser start supporting extensions.
The chance is however relatively good that some developers have already created extensions for popular web services. This article will look at five Google Chrome extensions for popular Google web services including Gmail and Google Reader.
Gmail Checker
Gmail Checker is a simple extension that displays a button in the Google Chrome menu bar. This button displays the number of unread email messages in the Gmail account which makes the extension useful as the user will be notified about new Gmail messages without having to visit the Gmail website first. [link]
Google Reader Checker
This is from the same developer who developed the Gmail Checker extension for the Chrome web browser. It is therefor not surprising that it works exactly like that extension. It will display a new button in the Chrome menubar that shows the count of the unread news items in Google Reader. [link]
Google Tasks
The Google Tasks add-on integrates Google Tasks into the web browser by allowing the user to access the tasks directly from within the web browser without having to open the Google Tasks website. [link]
gPDF
This extension allows the user to open pdf documents directly in Google Docs. There are two advantages of this method. First, no pdf reader needs to be installed on the computer system to read pdf documents and second, it will reduce the chance that the document exploits security vulnerabilities in the installed desktop pdf reader. [link]
Google Wave Checker
A basic extension that will display the unread Google Wave messages in the Google Chrome statusbar. [link]
Verdict:
Extensions are finally beginning to appear in greater numbers for the Google Chrome web browser but are hardly a match for the incredible amount of extensions for the Firefox web browser. It is likely that this is not going to change in the near future. The first step to make extensions more popular to both developers and end users would be to add extension capabilities to the public version of the Google browser.
Related posts:
- Official Google Chrome Extensions Website Opens Its Doors
- Gmail, Google Reader, Wave And Voice Notifier For Google Chrome
- Google Chrome And Firefox Extensions Differences
- Google Chrome Extensions Manager
- Where Do You Go For Declined Google Chrome Extensions
- Finally: Google Chrome Extensions Turned On By Default In Dev Releases
- Google Chrome To Get Automatic Userscript Support
- One Step Closer To Extension Support In Google Browser
too bad the reader and gmail checkers don’t work on the linux versions (they actualy crash them!! where is process isolation??!?)
Don’t forget GoCalendar: http://www.chromeextensions.org/alerts-updates/gocalendar