Google Chrome to Add Extensions

CNET.com reported earlier today that Google's new open source browser, Chrome, is soon to support third-party extensions to increase the functionality of the platform, similar to what other open source products — notably Mozilla Firefox — already do.

Released on September 2, Google's browser brought many innovations to the market, including multithreading to increase software security and stability, "private navigation" that doesn't leave tracks such as Web history and cookies residing on the hard drive, and a newly developed, third party open source component to render JavaScript code at fairly high speed.

Initially benefiting from Google's initial promotion, which featured a download link of the browser directly from the search engine homepage for several days in a row, Chrome soon surpassed the 1 percent mark in the browser market share, according to many analysts. A few weeks later, however, the browser seemed to begin losing some market share, prompting many users to either return to their old browsers or try a new one — Opera and Mozilla Firefox were the most common user choiches.

To many, the lack of extensions in the platform was one of the main reason to abandon Chrome, which, although seemingly quite fast and stable even in its beta version, was often considered too "essential" and lacking advanced features. With the present announcement, the Google team therefore hopes to specifically address that user concern and regain some of the lost ground.

The Chrome Extension Document doesn't include a precise timeline, but it does address a plugin architecture as one of the main priorities. Among other things, the document lists the ideal features future extensions should have and several examples as to what their general categories would be (bookmarking, content enhancements and filtering, download helpers, etc). Digging further in the document, we find out that the AdBlocker plugin support is a

According to the guidelines, developers will be able to write extensions using HTML/CSS, JavaScript and custom-made APIs: for security reasons, they will all be running in a dedicated process, except of course for content-modifying scripts, which need to run in the same process as the web page they are modifying.

Another interesting bit of information contained in the document is the idea that every single extension should be able, by default, to silently upload its updates to the user terminal: in Chrome developers' mind, this ought to be something extension developers shouldn't even plan for. To make the task even easier, the browser team is also planning to offer developers a service to reduce traffic costs and manage autoupdates, and says they might develop an end-user frontend to fetch and install the most popular plugins all in just a few clicks.

According to news site TgDaily.com, thanks to Google's initial promotion on Google.com and YouTube.com, the browser market share initially touched a record 1.16 percent, but then struggled to keep the pace, and only returned to touch the 1 percent mark again near Thanksgiving, when additional features such as a renovated bookmarking interface and a refined popup blocker.

In other words, Google's initial plan for Chrome to be a substantially lightweight browser doesn't seem to have completely paid off, which might have been a major factor in motivating the drafting of the roadmap document and the will to develop an add-on framework and extend the browser functionality with contributions from the open source developer community.

The preference of users for a feature-rich browser becomes even more evident when we consider that Chrome's market share started raising every time a Chrome update with new features was being released, the last of which was the Thanksgiving one. According to TgDaily.com, Chrome's average web usage share in November was 0.83%, up from 0.74% a month ago, surpassing Opera's 0.71% (down from 0.75% in October) and nearing the 0.84% share posted by IE8 (beta 1 and 2) in November.