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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?"
Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?
No. For a lot of us, that's like asking, "Does the ability to run JavaScript put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?" or even, "Does the ability to render HTML put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?"
Extensions are among the core featureset that a browser should support. With extensions, you simply make sure that everything is possible to accomplish with the extension API instead of implementing new features. That way, the user decides how bloated the browser becomes and doesn't have to put up with the bloat of unwanted features.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
It wasn't until I recently fired up Chrome that I realized how spoiled I've become with FF+AdBlock.
He was clearly talking about the architecture, not the UI.
Personally, I'm skeptical that Chrome will offer significant performance improvements over Firefox once its extension system is up to scratch. Even if Chrome's architecture is better, I would expect the extensions themselves to be of similar quality to those in Firefox.
I have a fundamental disagreement with the concept of telling your computer a domain points to a non-existent server simply in order to block advertisements originating from it.
The only entry in my hosts file is a server that was taking ages to respond, and as all it was providing was some stylesheets and javascript, I just mirrored the files on localhost and temporarily linked that server to 127.0.0.1. The hosts entry will be removed as soon as it’s no longer needed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
From the article:
The availability of extensions has nothing to do with potential bloat. It's how many extensions you add. Adding extensions for adding's sake will certainly cause bloat, but smart, targeted extension selection can keep things very lean. My Firefox install is efficient (for me) and lean.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Then packet dump. A reverse DNS on each packet would be enough information to whittle down the data.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I don't know about you, but I trust more Google than some random guys on the Internet.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Hey, extensions are great - but for one detail: Security! The current extensions model is as insecure as hell. All extensions have full access to the browser process - there is NOTHING that stops a rogue extension that was helpfully installed when you tried to punch the monkey and clicked "Yes" to the annoying question from watching everything you do in the browser and send any input you type into a form back to a mother ship you didn't even know existed.
I appreciate that the idea of adding a decent security model into extensions and plugins is a hard, thorny problem to solve. But that is exactly why we really, desperately need it! The browser is, for many computing environments, the "Operating System". Although I write this on a Linux laptop, the computing platform I use for development isn't Windows or Linux or MacOS, it's Firefox/Chrome! I don't personally much care what O/S the end user uses.
Because of this importance, because the browser is fast becoming the only O/S that actually matters, it's vitally important that we develop SOME kind of framework for application level security. The utter lack of a current extensions security model is just begging for disaster!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Complaining that your extensions make Chrome bloated is like complaining that your car weighs too much after you fill the trunk with cement -- if you want to keep it fast, just don't add extensions! If you would rather sacrifice a little speed for added functionality, go for it! Hell, if you want to install every single extension you find until your browser barely runs, that's your choice too! I can't see why anyone with half a brain, however, would suggest that the option to add extensions puts the browser at risk of becoming bloated.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
try posting that comment in a thread about linux vs windows.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock. If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall. That may happen whether or not you create the ad block extension because ads don't generate enough money to pay for the kind of reporting that newspapers used to do, but it will definitely happen if a tool for blocking ads gets adopted by any non-trivial subset of society.
I understand that advertisements can be annoying and often temperamental, but tools like this are rarely as precise as they should be. They usually end up blocking far more unless the user spends more time monkeying with the config files than it would take to actually glance at the ads or wait for them to finish their flash animation.
Also I want to remind people that some open source projects like Firefox depend on advertisements for their support. Google itself depends almost entirely upon ads for their revenue. While I recognize that many of their ads were historically unobtrusive, they are selling more and more display ads.
An ad blocker for Google chrome will not only hurt Google but slice into Google's revenues and undercut their ability to pay for more development. Okay, you say, let's be selfish and ensure that the ad blocker won't block Google ads. That's clever, but it still hurts Google because it hurts the free information ecosystem which is what drives Google. If there's no free information, there's fewer and fewer things for Google to index and thus fewer and fewer reasons to look at Google ads.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool. The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
Iron is Chrome, but without the open development process.
I'll consider trusting them when they deploy a public source code repository.
No, Chromium is Chrome but with all the things that violate your privacy removed (actually, not even added in the first place).
SRWare Iron is a lame attempt to rebrand Chromium.
From my browser:
From Google Chrome Extension site:
I realize that this was posted by kdawson, but having "beta test" in the title or, at the very least, somewhere in the summary would have been great.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I make very little use of extensions, so I've always assumed that the bloaty behaviour I'd seen from Firefox was largely due to something other than extensions. Mostly, I think the thing which slows my system to a crawl is Flash having a tantrum on a frequent basis, which doesn't change much across browsers. Chrome is good because it makes it easier to kill off Flash. But earlier today the browser to eat my memory sufficiently rapidly that it took about an hour to get access again and kill it properly. I'm blaming Flash for that. *sigh*
Why? So it can be labeled for the troll that it is? It's not about ordinary users combing through source code. All it takes is for one person to do it and make their findings known. If you're running a corporation or have the interest and money, you can just hire someone to go through it for you. Try doing that to closed source software.
Who modded the parent's tripe insightful anyway?