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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!"
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 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.
I think the problem is all the extra javascript that is being added to the average web site. I've noticed sites getting slower and slower even on the same version of Firefox. Then 3.5 came out and sped things up a bit. I suspect that this will encourage developers to use more excessive javascript when it's not necessary and slow down their sites even more.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
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'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...
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
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
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.)
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.
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.
Chrome updates extensions in the background without prompts. I was actually surprised when I realized this had happened, didn't expect it.
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!