Google set to promote Chrome extensions

Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.

The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)

Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability was expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta was planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due Jan. 12.

A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.

Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.

A perfect storm for rich Internet apps

The latest craze among the search/shopping/mapping/community etc. portals is look-alike personalized pages. Access to news, e-mail, stock quotes, buddies, RSS subscriptions from a single dashboard. The current fashion is the bare bones interface, shorn of any unnecessary graphics and with some basic configuration capabilities. Unadorned simplicity is good, but with broadband speeds and technologies like Flash is the stripped down interface what users really need or want for their "home" pages? Or, is it just what they are given, and what has historically worked for Yahoo and Google, which were build on basic HTML search interfaces.

MyYahoo personalized page



Google personalized home page



We have access to all kinds of rich media that should be accessible in personalized pages, not just as links. Corporate portals, for example, present dashboards with all kinds of vital data and widgets that allow you to run a business from a few screenfuls of information. Web map applications from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are becoming highly enriched and interactive.

A perfect storm is brewing for new kinds of personalized interfaces and applications that meld various media types and give users far more control over what is on their dashboard. You should be able to drag and drop widgets–your e-mail, stock portfolio, contacts, business metrics, feeds, playlists, TV shows, all within a standards-based browser environment. You should be able to perform tasks and interact without having to stray far from your personalized page. Laszlo Systems, for instance, has an open source platform for creating dashboards and rich Internet applications.

Prototype Laszlo dashboard



I’m not advocating that we should abandon the unadorned interface, but if broadband and media convergence are upon us, the sites with millions of users should at least give them the option of a rich Internet experience…

Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.