The Firefox add-on Google Shortcuts offers to place shortcut icons that link to Google services in a Firefox toolbar so that it becomes more convenient to open the Google websites.

Advanced users might say that this can also be done with bookmarks and they are right but Google Shortcuts is a very convenient way of adding links to Google services in the web browser.

The add-on places the icons that lead to the websites in the navigation toolbar. The icons can be moved into other toolbars easily by right-clicking a blank space in a toolbar and selecting customize.

The add-on’s options can be used to configure the services that should appear in the Firefox interface. It is very easy to add or remove services and even edit the urls of most entries which is handy for foreign users for instance.

The majority of services offered are Google web services but there are also some from Microsoft and a few dummy entries that can be customized by the user.

The options hold display settings as well to change the toolbar layout to a dropdown menu which saves space in the Firefox interface.

Google Apps users can enter their apps domain to make use of that as well.

The links behave the same way as standard links in Firefox. A left-click will open the website in the active tab, a middle-click in a new tab while left-click plus Ctrl-Alt opens the service in a sidebar which is helpful for some services such as Google Contacts.

Google Shortcuts can be downloaded from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The google.cn domain has been redirected to google.com.hk, the Google Search engine of Hong Kong. Users from Chinese mainland are automatically redirected to the Hong Kong search engine which is displayed in simplified Chinese to them.

Google mentioned further that they will carefully monitor the situation as it can very well be that the Chinese government decides to block access to the Google search engine and other Google services in the future.

Users from all over the world can take a look at the new Google China Service Availability page that displays status information about Google Services in China. It will in particular tell visitors if Google services such as Google Search, Youtube, Gmail, Blogger or Picasa are accessible, blocked or partially blocked.

The Google service availability page will be updated daily to reflect changes in the availability. It is interesting that Google decided to go forward with it as it surely means that they will lose some money and probably even access to the Chinese market completely.

What’s your opinion on the matter? Good or bad move by Google?

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.

The project is run by a Google engineering team which is maintaining the information on the website. The website lists 24 different Google services currently for which information are provided on how to import and export data in and out of them.

The information provided usually concentrate on showcasing the import and export features of Google products without going into to much detail. Below is the informatin provided on the Google Docs page at the project’s website.

The following Google services are currently listed at the website: Google AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Business, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Bookmarks, Contacts, Google Docs, Finance, Gmail, Google Health, iGoogle, Google Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa Web Albums, Reader, Google Voice, Web History, YouTube

The team is taking suggestions from users and seems to update the pages of the project fairly regular. Internet users can visit the Data Liberation Front website for additional information and the import and export guides.

Gbutts displays a huge list of Google services after installation which can be used to select the Google services that should be displayed in Firefox. The services that have been selected are then available as a toolbar that has to be dragged and dropped to a Firefox toolbar. It can for example be placed next to the address field in the Firefox web browser to provide one click access to the selected Google services.

The selected services can either be displayed as buttons in the toolbar so that they can be clicked on instantly or as a dropdown menu which would save some space in the toolbar if more than a handful of services are selected. The dropdown menu would increase the click count to access one of the Google services to two however.

GButts (that means Google Buttons actually) could be an interesting add-on for users who work with multiple Google services throughout the day and want to access these services as comfortably as possible. Everyone else is probably better of using bookmarks or creating keyboard shortcuts to access the Google services.