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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?"
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.
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.
If this doesn't get adblock I don't think it will ever make me switch, as it is I value to many of my firefox addons in my browser that I'd miss if I did change. Xmarks for example, read me later, stumbleupon....and a myriad of other extensions or addons I don't think I could do with out.
I don't use any Firefox extensions and I feel like it's bloated. Extensions aren't the problem, they're the solution.
Firefox has slowly become more and more like what really bothered me about IE. Nothing specific -- but it's getting slower and buggier. Just like IE. It's not quick and light like it used to be. I'm ready to try Chrome on my Mac.
Whale
Someone doesn't understand the concept of modular design. Lately stock it's reasonably snappy. If you choose to put in a bunch of addons and it gets slow, whose fault is that?
Normally I would let it slide but I've had my quota of stupid this afternoon. Cursed MySQL!
Anyway, Chrome actually performs scads better on my girlfriends netbook. Firefox is kind of a dog on it. So good news for her!
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.
What sort of masochist would browse without AdBlock?
I would sooner go whoring without condoms.
I've been using chrome for all my personal browsing with a host file. works pretty well for me.
You can find Adblock right here.
Works with SRWare Iron 4.x.
Now, quit complaining that Chrome doesn't have Adblock.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
True, though I prefer an HTML aware solution. Sometimes you need to collapse seizure_inducing_flash_advert.swf AND its associated div
I do, over a modem.
I would guess that I do end up avoiding sites with a lot of ads though, and I do use flashblock (which mitigates a lot of the beeping and cpu-grinding and whatnot).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I browse without AdBlock and I'm perfectly happy. I do use Ad Muncher however, as it works system-wide with all browsers (incl Chrome).
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.
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...
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!
+1 for AdMuncher. Adblock is superior within Firefox, but AdMuncher is a solution for ALL of your web browsing. I used it for years before switching to FF.
ClickToFlash for Safari is *invaluable* for that sort of nonsense. I use that in combination with a custom stylesheet and have an ad-free life on the net.
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.
Dyslexics are teople poo
The backend for awsomebar comes from moving the history into an sqlite database, a needed feature for anybody who tried to use history beyond a week, once that was done the UI is a very minimal change, so if you have a fucking clue what you were talking about you'd know that Awesome Bar isn't really bloat at all, but hey i guess your just yet another fucking awesomebar troll!
It took about an afternoon. There are a few downsides, however:
First, it's not actually adblock. It uses jQuery queries. This means it doesn't work at all with your existing filtersets. That's fine with me, since I don't want to block all ads, only the annoying ones -- animations, flash, etc.
Second, it's really cumbersome to use. SQL storage didn't work at the time, so I used CouchDB, which means you need to run a CouchDB server on localhost. I've also been entirely too lazy to add any sort of GUI.
Finally, the filters are applied after the DOM is loaded. They're a bit unreliable in the face of javascript ads, but on slow sites, there can be a noticeable lag. However, it doesn't slow my browsing down noticeably.
If people are still curious, the source is here.
The point, though, is that this took me less than an afternoon -- cold, from knowing nothing about Chrome extensions, to having a functional adblocker. In other words: Calm down, people, it really isn't that hard. I'm seeing posts that say things like "if this doesn't get adblock" -- it will.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What is all this talk about how Google Chrome violates your privacy? Does it send a list of everything I type and every site I go to, to Google?
Is there an option to turn it off? If there isn't a way to turn it off, I'm going back to Firefox. I don't want to use some third party hack of Chrome, thanks.
If you're on a Mac, GlimmerBlocker works (as it's a non-browser-dependent proxy which filters out ads).
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.
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"
what sorts of sites do you visit that ads are such a problem for you?
Advanced users are users too!
I actually don't care if a site displays ads at me, so long as they're well-behaved.
But I don't want a site to do ANYTHING that moves unless I give it permission. NoScript handles that pretty well.
There is a Flashblock extension there, which is a good start, but I'm going to hold off switching to Chrome full-time until I can selectively disable Javascript. (There are many good uses of it as well, so I don't want it disabled entirely.)
AdThwart works fine. I've been using it all day and have yet to see an ad. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb
Downmix -- Artscene News
Well, I've just dealt with Adblock in another post -- there are several adblocking extensions, and I wrote one myself in an afternoon. Trust me, adblock will happen, whether Google wants it or not.
So now let's talk about bloat...
First, I won't lie. It's a very real possibility. Take something like an adblocker -- in Chrome, that would be implemented as at least a "content script", a script which runs on every page. Every content script is adding some finite but real cost to the pages it effects. And of course, poor extension design would lead to a bloated browser.
On the other hand, no one's forcing you to install extensions, and a bare Chrome is much lighter than a bare Firefox.
Also, consider a properly designed extension -- you're going to have some of it running in the page as a content script, you might have some buttons in the toolbar, but chances are, you're also going to have a bunch of logic in a "background page", doing things like making HTTP requests, talking to your local sqlite database, messing with your bookmarks and tabs, and so on. A background page is essentially an HTML page that gets loaded in the background, and is completely invisible, except that scripts on it can talk to other parts of your extension. Add to that the fact that every popup, even configuration, is a separate HTML page, and communication between all of these happens through a message-passing API.
What does all of that mean?
It means that a fair chunk of every extension, including the glue that ties it together, is happening in a Background Page, which could very well be a separate process. I'm also fairly sure you can have more than one background page per extension. This means that almost by default, you have a certain amount of concurrency built in. So it might bloat, maybe, but it's certainly going to mean less chance for extensions to directly lag you, if they're all in a separate process -- possibly using a separate core.
Plus, v8 just screams.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
Well... It appears that the first google hit for 'chrome add-ons' links to mychromeaddons.com
This site is made to look like google's, but is LITTERED WITH ADS. The whois information reveals it's a third-party site.
The OFFICIAL chrome add-on site also does list an AdBlock extension, but something is fishy about it. When trying to install it, Chrome warns that "this extension is trying to access your data on api.flickr.com." What the hell?
We'll see if and how Google will try to combat these issues...
Except that Chrome includes the "awesome bar" by default, yet manages to be far less bloated than Firefox.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
I saw that too and immediately canceled. Some horny developer is going to be sadly disappointed when all the pictures he steals are of neckbeards in battle gear.
There's adblock for safari on mac. http://burgersoftware.com/en/safariadblock Works fine on Snow Leopard if you set Safari to 32 bit mode.
no longer working for cnet
No AdBlock? I've been using the Chromium version of AdBlock Plus for a few weeks now. That chromeextensions.org site has been live for quite some time.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
Why do you care how it is blocked? In many ways it is similar to how DoS attacks are blocked along major backbone routes. You just blackhole the IP, telling it to go to a local, non-answering IP. In this case you are just blackholing the domain, sending it to an IP that shouldn't be answering (unless you want it to like you did using localhost to answer more quickly for sites you care to mirror). Please elaborate with what is wrong with using the hosts file in a way that is effective? I do understand that using the hosts with a big list can cause DNS resolution slowdowns (as it parses the hosts list, in memory, for every DNS call, prior to making a call to your cache or DNS server), but if the list isn't that big it isn't noticeable. So please, what is this fundamental disagreement about?
This was my approach to Firefox. I usually only kept a handful of my must-have extensions enabled. It also was my logic to abandon every single one of my extensions and move to Chrome... the startup time was simply unbeatable. I had up to 30 seconds in Firefox... later I would find out 33% of that was a malfunctioning AdBlock Plus, but even with managing to cut it down to 6-10 seconds it was still slower than Chrome.
what internet are you using that ads haven't been a problem for you?
The link (to the AB+-like extension) in TFS is questionable... this is arguably a better target. OTOH, reviews are mixed (see for yourself).
$ make available
It’s an ugly hack. That’s all. I put it on a similar playing field with the DNS domain search pages. You’re breaking the internet, or a part of it.
Much more elegant is telling your browser “hey, this object/element... don’t load it.”
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Does anybody have any experience with Xmarks in Chrome? I want to try it out ASAP, as it's the only thing preventing me from using Chrome full-time, but I get scared away with very beta software like this-- I'm afraid it'll delete all my bookmarks.
Any opinions?
Comment of the year
I for one have been waiting for Chrome extensions. I think Firefox does a good job managing them. It's always good to know how to disable/uninstall. I don't find Firefox to be bloated. You want bloat? Check out my WoW addon directory!
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*
Well, if one should judge from the reviews, then it seems it has only been up for about 2hours... So I would suspect it to get a fair bit better quite soon
Lately I started using the awsome bar, but I used to hate it. What got me is that I have my homedirs exported via NFS. That in itself was annoying for using firefox since I needed different profiles for different machines in order to be able to run more than one firefox at a time on different hosts. But after a while I had a nice system where I could use a few profiles on all my machines and have bookmarks and history follow me around. But then the awesome bar made it so that those sqlite dbfiles were being used for everything. sqlite and nfs simply did not play well together. I ended-up having to symlink my firefox profiles to copies on local disks. So for all that time that I did not use the awesome bar, I lost the easy way of using a few profiles on many different machines. That is what bugged me the most about awesome bar.
You’re breaking the internet, or a part of it.
Really, wow. I didn't know that my client had any effect on the internet, especially in a negative way. It might be a hack but it is a useful hack for when you just want a site to load but it keeps hanging on a few of the ad / image server. Sometimes the problem is bigger than a few object/elements. Use the right tool for the right job and all of that.
I develop websites. I don't use AdBlock or NoScript. I don't have any problems.
The bloat is the users choice, you know you're adding extensions.
Previously (as in Firefox 3) the bloat was not an option, it just came bloated unlike the base install of Chrome.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I use Privoxy. It works with any browser that supports proxies.
And then we get into a world where people bundle sets of extensions into different 'standard' feature sets, call them distributions, and different distributions being subtly incompatible with eachother . . . have we been down this road before, maybe? The strictly bare bones approach you advocate doesn't work for anything but the smallest percentage of users.
There is not a chance in hell I'm going to browse the web without an ad blocker and a JavaScript white list. The web is totally useless without those two features. I don't like flashing, blinking ads, and I don't like other people running code on my machine indiscriminately.
But more to the point: Since I'll never, ever click on a banner ad why wouldn't you want me to save your bandwidth by not downloading your creatives? There's absolutely zero chance I'll click on it (since doing so only reinforces the notion that banner ads are in any way a good thing), so why would you want me to cost you money by downloading it?
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.
You're conflating image-based ads with Google's text ads, and implying that image-based advertising is in any way key to their revenue stream. You shouldn't do that. Google's ads don't flash, blink, etc. They're descriptive, and not misleading. They're context-generated, and so most likely pertain to what interests you at the given moment. Banner ads are none of the above. Google's ads are occasionally useful. Your banner ads are useless to the point of being an annoyance. See the difference?
I actually do click on Google's ads. I'll continue to do so, since I occasionally find them useful. Banner ads I will never find useful.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
An extension I'd really care for would be the ability of editing text areas on my favorite editor. Even console-based browsers support that, I never understood why it's not the default behaviour in browsers. That doesn't seem possible in chrome yet :-(.
Agreed. If anything the people who broke the internet were all the webmasters expecting to pay for their sites, and possibly get some cash flow, via an ever increasing number of ads litering their sites. Then once other webmasters saw that hey, I can make a few pennies here and there, why shouldn't I get on this almost free cash boat. If webmasters (and their clients / company) weren't so cheap/greedy, then we'd never be in this situation. I miss the days of dial up if only because their was real content on the web for a good decade without the bloat of millions of ads.
I simply don't visit sites with intrusive advertising.
You see, when you visit a site with Adblock you aren't really sending the site owners the right message. What you are doing is hoping that those who don't use Adblock keep "funding" your visits to that site. This, coupled with the childish "No Ad block?!, me no use!" posts every time Chrome is mentioned, means that you are cutting the same branch you are sitting on.
Yes, it's a selfish world. I am sure you recognize that. Do you like selfish people? I know I don't so I usually try not to act the same as those I criticize. If everyone would do the same we might have a chance, if they won't, at least I am letting myself feel a little better inside.
Works fine on my Mac with the latest build of Chromium and the enable extension Inst bookmark.
// no
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.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Trying to install that adblock and it throws up a warning that the adblock extension with have access to your private information on api.flikr........ I shut it down immediately
The adblock equivlent is available. It is called adthwart. It is listed as a top extension. It by default uses EasyList which is by far the most popular advertisement list for Adblock.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
The thing is there is an adblock. It supports the subscriptions that adblock plus original uses too. The problem is that the content still loads - this filter doesn't prevent that, it only blocks it from being displayed. While this solves some of the problem, it also means that you're still adding to page load times, etc just as if the ads were displayed.
I just looked over at my IE using workmates PC and though, people actually live like that?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The comments in this story make me long for the good 'ole days when Phoenix (Firefox's original name) was a lean, mean frame-around-a-rendering-engine machine. The whole design philosophy of Phoenix was that the browser would consist of a bare-bones UI, the various rendering engines, and the extensions framework. The rest of the features would be provided by features that were chosen by the user.
Sadly, the browser core suffered from feature creep. Tab management, spell checking, RSS feed management, session management/restoration, etc. all migrated from perfectly good extensions into the browser itself. While these features are great, the fact that they used to exist as extensions shows there is no need to keep them in the browser core.
I really wish the developers had simply maintained and distributed a set of "core extensions" for these features, so they were enabled by default on new installs but the user could disable them as necessary. It's way too late for Firefox, but maybe Chrome has the option of following this model...
Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
I disagree. Here's an anecdote which proves it ;-)
One day I thought to myself, "I want to buy some $foo". I turn to google, enter "buy $foo" in the search box, and look at the results. None of the look promising.
That is, except for the sponsored link, accompanied by an unobtrusive short paragraph of text, fairly accurately saying "here's a URL. If you go there, you can buy $foo". I went there, looked at the prices, they seemed fair.
I was happy, Google was happy, the advertiser was happy.
Now, back to your discussion of 99.9% of advertisement which gives the rest a bad name ;)
And I'd like to jump on the bandwagon of commenters pointing out that blaming extensions for contriubting to browser bloat is like faulting sour milk for ruining your cereal.
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
AdThwart is a much better ad blocking extension for Chrome than Adblock+. AdThwart uses the EasyList from Firefox's Adblock Plus, and it seems to block everything pretty well. It's totally unconfigurable but since EasyList works very well that's fine by me. AdThwart is at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb
On Ubuntu Hardy, I find that this version works well: 4.0.267.0~svn20091208r34029-0ubuntu1~ucd1~hardy (from the Ubuntu Chromium PPA). Once you find a version that works well it's best to hold it in your package manager (e.g. "wajig hold" on Ubuntu or Debian) so that you don't get a daily update to a version that crashes on launch, as happened to me recently. Generally Chromium is very impressive for an alpha browser (I'm using the dev channel on Ubuntu via the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa ) - very fast, and leaves maximum screen area for content.
I really like being able to install extensions without restarting the browser - Firefox should have this, it can already do this for plugins bizarrely enough (even Netscape had this feature though it wasn't easy to invoke).
The middle click behaviour is annoying but the speed of Chrome is enough to make me use it more. All I need now is for Xmarks to come out of beta.
And your pointing a site to localhost to serve up css and js more quickly... how isn't that exactly the same as what Tynin is talking about. Aren't you "breaking the internet" too (or whatever you mean by that)?
Yes. It is also an ugly hack, but it would have been even uglier if (a) every page took 30 seconds to load because of waiting on the slow server for the css and js files or (b) I had to adblock the server and display the pages without any css.
Sometimes an ugly hack is temporarily acceptable. Permanently, only if there is no more elegant solution. For ad blocking, there is.
My hosts file is back to normal now.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is not an ugly hack, this is what hostfiles et cetera are for in the first place.
No. Host files are for naming IP addresses when you don’t have a DNS server to resolve the names, not for breaking the DNS entry for sites you don’t want your browser to access.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I repeat: It is more elegant to prevent the browser from even trying to access the blocked content.
Letting the browser try to access the blocked content, and having it fail because you locally broke the DNS entry with a hosts line specifying an incorrect IP... that is an ugly hack.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I use a Mac, you insensitive clod!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.