Google Chrome Extensions Are Now Available

kai_hiwatari writes "The Google Chrome Extensions site is now open for Windows and Linux users — but not yet for Mac — and contains around 300 extensions. AdBlock is not yet available, however. (The closest thing to it is Adsweep, but right now it seems to be broken. Who wants to take this on?) Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?"

Comments

SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons

[sopssa]

Even though I'm a little bit skeptical about the bloated aspect, hopefully SRWare Iron will be updated to support them soon too. Iron is Chrome but with all the things that violate your privacy removed.

Hopefully Chrome's extension system is done better than in Firefox though. It becomes incredibly clumsy, and the interface itself is already too. Been the main reason I've stayed with Opera, as it has everything build-in and works fast. But maybe Chrome becomes more useful now.

Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons

[sopssa]

TripMaster Monkey, how do you know that it's not as privacy-invasive as Chrome is? Just because they say so on their web site?

Iron is free and OpenSource.

So you can check it yourself. Or packet dump, whichever you prefer.

Re:SRWare Iron and firefoxs addons

[mdm-adph]

Hey, I think Chrome's great, too, but I don't see how you can call Firefox's extension system "incredibly clumsy" -- you install extensions, you can remove them from an addons panel, and they're upgraded automatically (which is more than you can say for Chrome, I think). That's it -- there's nothing more to it.

adthwart

[GrumpyOldMan]

I'm in the process of trying out Chrome, and was looking for adblockers. Right now, I'm using adthwart (http://qux.us/adthwart/). It uses EasyList, just like AdBlockPlus on firefox. So far, it seems to work nearly as well as AdBlockPlus, but is not as configurable.

You guys want Adblock? You've got Adblock!

[icannotthinkofaname]

You can find Adblock right here.

Works with SRWare Iron 4.x.

Now, quit complaining that Chrome doesn't have Adblock.

Re:You guys want Adblock? You've got Adblock!

[hackel]

I've been using this Adblock+ extension in Chromium for a while and it works well and even supports (Firefox) Adblock Plus subscriptions. However, Chromium doesn't yet support content filtering so all this extension does is *hide* ads, it does not stop them from loading...

It will never get adblock

[KlaasVaak]

Google Chrome doesn't have content policy so all the 'adblock' extensions there are currently are not adblocks but adhides, fine for surfing the web without being annoyed but useless for your privacy and page loading speed.

Re:You guys want Adblock? You've got Adblock!

[fluffy99]

I've been using this Adblock+ extension in Chromium for a while and it works well and even supports (Firefox) Adblock Plus subscriptions. However, Chromium doesn't yet support content filtering so all this extension does is *hide* ads, it does not stop them from loading...

So it's not really blocking webbugs then. Hmm.

Re:is there a proper chrome build for mac yet?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

is there a proper chrome build for mac yet?

Seriously? Four articles previous to this one: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/12/08/177232 is titled "Google Upgrades Chrome To Beta For OS X, Linux"

Re:Bloat...

[The MAZZTer]

Some of my own real observations:

You are limited to one background page per extension. There is no need for more than one. If you want concurrent code you will probably be able to use an HTML5 web worker or something like that, or at least fake it by using setTimeout.

Separate process implies separate threads, which can run on any core that the OS decides to assign them to. So yeah the more cores you have the more efficient Chrome will be, extensions or not.

AdBlock+ has not noticeably affected my browser speed (single core proc here).

I wrote an extension that uses what's probably on par with a "typical" extension's usage of localStorage. Again, no noticeable browser slowdown that I've seen.

Re:Extensions security?

[Thinboy00]

At least mozilla disables the "OK" button for ~5 seconds so that you actually read the warning (and by default doesn't allow installation of extensions from anywhere other than addons.mozilla.org (but you can (easily) change that if you want to so it's not evil)).

Re:Extensions security?

[buchner.johannes]

All mozilla extensions on addons.mozilla.org go through a review process. Stuff might slip through, but its unlikely that unwanted behaviour in popular addons isn't noticed. The addons are distributed over SSL.

Re:No

[mzs]

Actually virtually all Firefox extensions are js and DOM interacting with foo.xul. You can create C++ extensions as well though.

Re:Bloat...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Not in the current design, unless there's something I'm missing. At least, not necessarily.

The problem is that Chrome provides no way to filter content before it gets to the renderer. So by the time I remove a Flash ad, Flash is already loaded. By the time I remove a script tag, the script has already run. By the time I remove an image, a connection has probably been opened to download the image, and there's a chance it's already here.

With the current extension framework, noscript and flashblock are impossible. You can fake it, but that's faking it -- a script will still have time to do some damage.

Now, it still has a chance to kill the image/flash before it does too much. It's still going to be faster once the page is loaded. But it's never going to be as slick as it would be with Firefox, unless the extension API changes.

I'm tempted to take my existing adblocker and migrate it to something like privoxy. There is something to be said for letting the browser parse the page first, but there's enough HTML parsing libraries out there. Plus, it would mean ad blocking for all browsers, forever.

On Chromium

[aBaldrich]

Iv'e successfully installed ten Google (Closed source) Chrome Extensions on Chromiun (FLOSS), in linux. Now I have a free browser with most advantages of Chrome and Firefox combined.