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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!"
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.
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 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.
You can't force people not to develop and deploy solutions to filter out ads any more than you can force them to look at them.
You have to accept this, and if your business model can't work because of it then it simply means that it's not viable.
So, in summary, if we block the ads, we'll have the internet of 1992, which I rather enjoyed?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Chrome updates extensions in the background without prompts. I was actually surprised when I realized this had happened, didn't expect it.
To each his own. I like glancing at my home town newspaper without committing to a big subscription. If the ads don't work, though I won't have that option.
If you really want to live in the past, here's the Wayback Machine's take on Slashdot:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.slashdot.org
Note, it didn't exist before ads and it won't exist without them.
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!
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Have you considered why people block ads in the first place? Historically ads have been both obtrusive and have degraded the user experience in terms of performance. Advertisers do not have a good record of restraining themselves, if they can get a neon ad to appear in the middle of your screen and shake around until you respond to it, that's what they're going to do. Now that the public has the ability to restrain ads it's up to the advertisers to figure out how to structure their ads so that they are not a problem for users. It would be pretty easy to gauge how well they're doing by the number of people who choose to block ads. It's not up to the public to support an obnoxious business model, if advertisers want money they need to figure out how to not be obnoxious. Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool.
If the long-term consequences involve removing ads from the internet, that's not a bad thing. Even if a lot of content goes with it, in time the content will come back and there will always be people willing to post content without expecting a paycheck from it. The internet doesn't exist to put money in your account.
The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
No it's not, it's far more robust then you give it credit for. Information will always be available online, as long as there are people willing to spread their message without being paid for it. That's the backbone of the internet, advertisers and people selling content are just along for the ride. If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Right, and it will be replaced with content that doesn't require advertising to support it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The problem is that AdBlock's only mode is "always on, except on whitelisted sites." If it had a mode of "always off, except for blacklisted sites" then I think a lot more people would get behind it-- content creators and web surfers.
I know for me, there are only about 3 domains I regularly see that have ads I want to block, everything else I visit I want to see the ads. But there's no way to tell AdBlock this, and so my choices are either to block all ads, or keep AdBlock constantly turned-off until I'm on one of those sites. Neither is a good choice.
Comment of the year