This past year felt like a rebuilding year for Firefox add-ons, with two new frameworks implemented to help guide the future of extensions. Personas gave Firefox on-the-fly theme-switching, and users can expect it to be part of the stable version of Firefox 3.6 when that gets released. Jetpack takes a similarly-minded approach to feature add-ons, allowing programmers to create feature-rich add-ons from little more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Expect JetPack to eventually be part of Firefox by default.
In no particular order, here are eight other of our favorites:
Weave Sync gets added to your Options menu.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Weave Sync is another project from Mozilla Labs, although it's not as clear whether it will eventually end up in Firefox as a default feature. This homegrown tool for synchronizing Firefox across computers and devices introduces incremental syncing and a more-streamlined, less-obtrusive experience, fitting in smoothly in your Options pane. Although it still conflicts with some extensions, including the massively popular and arguably more essential AdBlock Plus, in general it works well and brings a long-missing feature to Firefox.
Multi Links is simple in purpose, but so effective that it's one of the best add-ons of the year. Right-click in a browser tab and drag it, highlighting multiple links in the box. By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links, just in case you're into that sort of thing.
Originally known as SmarterFox, FastestFox is a multitasking fiend that helps make searching, pasting, surfing, and downloading faster. Highlight a word or phrase on the Web page and FastestFox will display a bubble filled with search engine icons. After a few seconds of inactivity, the search bubble fades away. The add-on automatically merges linked pages into one, which some users prefer for reading long articles, and it also allows you to check other search engines from any single engine's results page.
Users with WebReview installed can see a slew of links when they load up their browser, including their most visited pages, along with suggestions of what they should read based on past browsing history.
(Credit: WebReview)Whether you're looking for an unobtrusive panic button, or your just need to clear your screen of those 153 tabs for moment, HideTab can help you out. You can hide all of them at once, or merely one--just don't forget that the hidden tabs are still running in the background.
WebReview makes your start page smarter and more suggestive based on past browsing habits. It's a bit like the Speed Dial feature in Opera, Chrome's new tab page, or Top Sites in Safari, but Firefoxified. It tells you the last batch of tabs you had open, along with most visited pages. But it also shows you a group of sites you visit daily, along with a suggestion of sites you may be interested in going to. It sorts these out by what day it is, along with the time.
WebReview also offers a replacement history tracker, allowing you to search by domain or number of visits. Sites in the WebReview history come with thumbnail previews. Lastly, there's a Graph View, showing the breadcrumb trail of how you went from site to site for that entire session. You can also go back to specific days and see a large graph for the entire day. It's visually appealing and exploratory at the same time.
FastestFox can be a bit of overkill, and one of our favorite features from it is available separately. PageZipper takes stories split over multiple pages and "zips" them into one. It's a bit wonky, and doesn't play nicely with Flash- or JavaScript-based photos, but in general works well. It's also designed to be inoffensive to publishers, who often have legitimate reasons for splitting content into multiple pages. The "zipping" loads the next page in full below, including ads, so their potential revenue goes unharmed. The reader, on the other hand, benefits from significantly less stop-and-go clicking.
Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.
(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)Wikipedia Diver hooks deep into your Wikipedia browsing to provide a fascinating look at what you've been researching. It organizes your Wiki searches down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries. Fortunately, all this data is kept on your local computer and not in the cloud, so there are no privacy issues. The reasonable offshoot of that is that it doesn't track external links you click on from within a Wikipedia article, but that's a small price to pay.
I use URL Tooltip in conjunction with several other, not-new-in-'09 add-ons to maximize my screen real estate when browsing. URL Tooltip is new this year, and is quite savvy for those with larger monitors. It reveals a link's full URL as a mouse-over tool tip, thus allowing you to hide your status bar at the bottom of Firefox if you've got nothing else in it. Along with Personal Menu and the Stop-or-Reload Button, and removing the search bar, I've been able to see more of what I want to be looking at on my screen when browsing.
Have a suggestion for the best new Firefox add-on of 2009? Or think I just got it all wrong? Tell me about it in the comments below.
Even without extensions, Google Chrome's market share grew phenomenally during its first year. Now that the No. 1 most-requested feature comes baked into the Windows (beta and development) and Linux (beta and development) versions, it's time to look at some of the best extensions available for the upstart browser.
Google Chrome's extension manager.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The No. 1 extension on my list is the No. 2 most-requested feature for Chrome: RSS support. The RSS Subscription Extension allows Chrome to automatically detect RSS and Atom feeds on a page. It's not entirely clear why this isn't a default feature since it's part of every other browser, but at least now there's a way to add it.
There are a host of Google-service related extensions, all based on letting you know at a glance if there's an update for you to check in on. The Google Alerter covers Gmail, Wave, and Google Reader, although there's also individual support for them as the Gmail Checker, Google Wave Checker, and Google Reader Checker. There's a Google Calendar Checker, too.
The Google Translate extension adds a slick pop-up toolbar.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The Google Tasks extension hides your tasks behind a button that opens a list of them when clicked. The most useful Google-related extension is for Google Translate, which will offer on-the-fly translation of a site that doesn't appear in your default system language.
Expect security to be as big a subcategory of extensions for Chrome as it is for Firefox. Popular and effective secure personal password storehouse LastPass provides a safe and near-universal way to manage your passwords, making them easily accessible without compromising their integrity. LastPass also supports Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, making it an excellent one-stop solution. When Chrome's extensions get activated on the Mac version, the reasons for using LastPass will become even more compelling.
LastPass options in Chrome.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Also cross-browser, Web of Trust evaluates Web sites based on consensus. It may sound counter-intuitive to some, but it's proven in the past year to be an especially effective tool for determining whether you can trust that sketchy link you're thinking of clicking on.
UnShorten.com is one way to see what that shortened URL is hiding, but ChromeMUSE is another. This useful extension not only can shorten URLs via several different shortening services, it can also expand embedded short URLs automatically.
FlashBlock is a good way to kill Flash and Silverlight-based content. It leaves a blank spot where the ad or embedded video would've been, which you can then selectively load by clicking on it.
Despite the name, AdBlock+ should be avoided. It's not made by the same publishers who manage AdBlock Plus, the popular and effective ad-blocker for Firefox. This is actually a fairly serious problem with Chrome's extensions, where unknown entities are appropriating identical or similar names to well-known and trusted Firefox add-ons for what amount to nefarious purposes. So far, the ad-blocking extension that most users seem to be trusting in Chrome is AdBlock, but don't be surprised if it causes more problems than it solves until there's more consensus on these name-squatters.
AniWeather offers an animated weather pop-up.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)On that note, there are some excellent Firefox add-ons that have been ported successfully to Chrome. Bookmark synchronizer Xmarks has a beta version for Chrome, as does IE Tab for viewing rendering sites with Internet Explorer's engine within Chrome, and the resource-heavy but still-fun way to view visual media Cooliris.
Facebook for Chrome simplifies Facebook access, putting news feed and status updating in your toolbar. YouTube Downloader grabs Flash video embeds and saves them to your hard drive but interestingly doesn't come from Google itself. AniWeather is another, providing those without windows an excellent way to see what meteorological events are going on outdoors. iMacros will run Greasemonkey scripts and allows users to create their own solutions for repetitive data entry and tasks. The one I can't live without is another name-squatter, AutoCopy. It will copy any text to your clipboard when you highlight it. Unlike the Firefox version, it doesn't open any options when you finish highlighting, so it's a bit hard to tell if it's working as it should.
TooManyTabs cleverly secrets away tabs you want to keep handy but out of your active memory.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)TooManyTabs isn't TabMixPlus for Chrome, but it does something that TabMixPlus can't because Firefox doesn't yet support it. TooManyTabs manipulates Chrome's tab process isolation in a useful way, so you can move tabs to a holding dock where they're no longer eating memory, but they're still easily accessible. Click on the toolbar button and it opens up a window that displays your active tabs. Arrows next to each one let you move it to the nonfunctional area. A helpful indicator on the toolbar button tells you how many active tabs you've got. Conspicuously missing is drag-and-drop, so hopefully that's coming.
Aviary Screen Capture is another extension that offers Chrome-only features. It lets you take a screenshot of any Web site you're looking at and then automatically opens it in Aviary's image-editing Web suite to streamline your work flow.
The lack of a status bar in Chrome means that the management icons for extensions, if they have them, get added to the navigation bar, something that may annoy users who prefer Firefox's greater level of extension-placement customization. However, it's definitely a more visible placement, and may encourage users to keep their installed extensions to a utilitarian minimum.
More extensions can be downloaded from Google's site or Download.com.
Currently, extension support hasn't been activated in the Chrome for Mac, but that's expected no later than January 2010. There's also some notable popular Firefox extensions that aren't in Chrome yet, such as FoxyTunes. If I've skipped a favorite Chrome extension of yours, or if there's one for Firefox that you're dying to get in Chrome, tell me about it in the comments below.
It appears that the Google Goggles search-by-sight tool could soon work not just with mobile phones, but through Google's Chrome browser, too.
"I am working on a 20 percent project to facilitate the input of Web image searching," Google programmer Xiuduan Fang said in a post Tuesday to the Chrome Extensions mailing list titled "Chrome extension for Web Goggles. The 20 percent figure refers to a Google program that permits engineers to devote a fifth of their time to projects of their own choosing.
"We would like to have some browser extensions so that the user can drag a Web image and drop it in an input box on the toolbar...The search results of the image will be shown," Fang said, then asking for advice on how to write it up for Chrome. The original message isn't online, though a response with some pointers is.
Google Goggles currently is available as an application for phones running Google's Android operating system, but Google is working to release other versions, too. A Web browser interface would expand the service's availability beyond phones. Though there are plenty of situations where you might want to point your phone at a subject while out and about, there also are plenty of images on the Web that might provoke further inquiry.
The Goggles feature works by comparing an uploaded image to a database of billions Google has collected and analyzed. It can recognize landmarks and read the text of wine labels, among other things, but until Google works out privacy controls it doesn't make use of its ability to recognize faces. The effort is part of Google's unending effort to expand the scope and utility of its search service.
The new beta version of Google's Chrome browser adds support for extensions, though at present with some limits on user interface choices for programmers.
Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, takes a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. The Google Goggles feature successfully identified it during the Dec. 7 demonstration that was the feature's debut.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The beta version of Chrome for Mac OS X is available. Google released its browser beta for Linux too.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.
Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.
Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in tech circles for the Mac version of Chrome. Linux, while less widely used among ordinary computer users, has importance of its own: it's the foundation for Chrome OS. That's the browser-based operating system Google hopes will be popular on Netbooks starting next year.
According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta versions are scheduled to graduate to the next level of maturity, "stable," on January 12. Chrome for Windows graduated out of beta almost exactly a year ago.
Google doesn't emphasize product version numbers in the project, instead automatically delivering updates behind the scenes to the browser that take effect when it's restarted. But it does use version milestones to keep track of development internally.
The biggest new feature of Chrome 4.0 is support for extensions, which let people customize the browser. In the Mozilla world, they're called add-ons, and they've been a big part of Firefox's success.
Mac OS X has a mandatory menu bar, so unlike the Windows version, Chrome on the Mac has traditional menus.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Extensions aren't useful, though, unless people can find them. Google on Tuesday also launched a Chrome extensions gallery page.
There are more than 300 extensions available for Chrome, extensions programmers Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay said in a blog post.
However, extensions on the Mac aren't yet available, though they had been for a time in the developer-preview version. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon," Rakowski said.
Also on the Chrome for Mac to-do list: a bookmark manager, PDF viewing in the browser, bookmark synchronization, 64-bit support, and my personal favorite differentiator of Firefox 3.6 on the Mac, full-screen support.
Chrome now has an extensions gallery.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Why try Chrome?
For those of you new to Chrome, here's a brief version of why it's my default browser on both Windows and, as of about a month ago, Mac OS X. Your preferences and needs may vary, of course, and I still use Firefox every day, too.
• Speed. It's fast to start up, though not quite as snappy as it once was now that it's not so bare-bones, and rivals are making progress. It's also fast loading Web pages and running JavaScript programs on them.
• Tabs. I spawn innumerable new tabs all day long, and when it takes a long time (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I get infuriated. I also like the order in which new tabs arrive, a style Firefox is mimicking.
• The omnibox. It's a single bar that merges the utility of an address bar and search bar. I hit Ctrl-L (on Windows) or Command-L (on Mac) to pop my cursor up there, and start typing. One nice--if somewhat obscure--feature is fast site search on some domains, so for example I can type A, M, tab, and up pops an Amazon.com icon; what I type afterward is entered as a search on Amazon. That conveniently gets me straight to the search results so I don't have to see yet another Kindle ad.
• A minimal user interface. When browsing, I like my user interface to step aside and make way for the Web page. Scrolling was a wonderful innovation in computers a few decades ago, but I like to avoid it when I can. Chrome puts tabs in the real estate ordinarily devoted to a program's title bar and shuffles the menu controls off to the right of that tab strip (though the Mac version gets a regular menu bar).
Another potential perk: avant-garde Web technology, including WebGL and O3D for accelerated 3D graphics and Native Client for speeding up Web apps with direct access to a processor, are being built into Chrome. Another such Google project, Gears, is already built into Chrome--though Gears doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.
There are things you might miss--the full panoply of Firefox extensions, toolbars from Google or others, print preview. And the "browser not supported" error messages on various Web pages are annoying, though in my experience there's rarely an actual compatibility problem. Overall, I like it.
Is Google spying on me?
If you're worried about what new data Google will be able to harvest on you, I recommend a close read of Google's Chrome privacy page. This doesn't worry me much, but I may be insufficiently paranoid. In my opinion, the biggest thing is that Google stores 2 percent of the data it gathers when people type text into Chrome's combination search and address bar, called the omnibox.
That means Google can see not only what you're searching for (as it would for any Google search), but what Web site addresses you're typing as well. The data is anonymized within 24 hours, Google said.
Also, Chrome has a feature called DNS pre-fetching that tracks down the Internet server addresses on Web pages in anticipation that you'll be clicking links on the page. So Chrome--and Google, too, if you're using Google Public DNS--retrieves this information from the Internet.
Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST and 1:20 p.m.. Added further detail.
The present interface for developers to upload their Chrome extensions.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Google has opened up its gallery for developers to share Chrome extensions, a step that soon should make it easier for people to customize the open-source browser.
Aaron Boodman, a leader of the Chrome extensions effort, announced the move on a mailing list posting Monday, and programmer and "gallery master" Lei Zheng shared details in a blog post.
So far, only uploads are permitted. Google plans to let some testers use the gallery to download extensions, too "in the next few days," Zheng said. "We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch."
Extensions, a major asset of the Firefox browser and the headline feature of the upcoming Chrome 4 beta, let people modify the browser more to their liking. With them, the browser itself doesn't have to be bogged down with numerous features and configuration options that most people don't want.
One feature of Google's system is that add-ons are automatically updated on Chrome users' computers once the developer uploads a new version.
For developers, the extensions gallery comes with a set of terms and conditions.
One nugget in the legalese: expect Google to use a rating system, as it does for other sites including Android applications and YouTube videos. It's all part of Google's philosophy of using user data to help automatically manage its Web properties in a way that, the company hopes, will be helpful to those who use its sites.
According to the terms and conditions: "The gallery will allow users to rate products. Along with other factors, product ratings may be used to determine the placement of products on the gallery with higher rated products generally given better placement, subject to Google's right to change placement at Google's sole discretion. For new developers without product history, Google may use or publish performance measurements such as uninstall rates to identify or remove products that are not meeting acceptable standards, as determined by Google."
The developer preview version of Chrome now promotes an as-yet unworking link to an extensions gallery.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)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 expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 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.
Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.
Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.
Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.
But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.
"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.
And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.
"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"
More people will get a chance to try out bookmark synchronization with Monday's release of a beta version of Google Chrome for Windows.
Google introduced the bookmark sync feature for the developer-preview version in August, but now it's also in the better-tested beta version, Chrome 4.0.223.16. However, there's still no Chrome beta for Mac OS X or Linux.
In a video explanation, Google's Anthony LaForge somewhat breathlessly describes how the sync feature can keep bookmarks the same on multiple machines. That's a fair point, but let's be realistic here--bookmark sync in Chrome is more catch-up than paradigm shift. Indeed, with the popular Xmarks extension--in the works for Chrome, people can synchronize bookmarks among multiple browsers, not merely multiple computers.
And Chrome's clever message-based sync technology notwithstanding, Chrome bookmarks would be a lot more magical if they synchronized with the Google bookmarks service, which is linked with iGoogle and the Google Toolbar.
Speaking of extensions, one of the 4.x series' biggest features is the ability to accommodate extensions, but because Google is shifting the extensions interface, the feature isn't enabled in the beta version. Chrome is released in three versions: the roughest, fastest moving developer preview, the more stable beta, and the stable edition for the broadest audience.
The 4.x series has other significant features, too, though it's not clear whether they'll arrive in the beta or stable versions. One is Google's Native Client, which lets JavaScript applications take more direct advantage of a PC processor's horsepower through a careful security mechanism. Another is WebGL, a 3D interface that does the same with hardware-accelerated graphics.
Together, the features have the potential to dramatically improve the power and sophistication of Web-based applications. That's particularly interesting given that Google is building Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system.
The Mac version isn't in beta yet, but it's a priority.
"Our goal for this Friday is to be able to count our Mac P1 M4 release blocker bugs on one hand (we're in the 20s now)," said Chrome programmer Mike Pinkerton in a mailing list announcement on Monday. P1 bugs are priority-one; M4 refers to milestone 4, or version 4.0.
And Google is willing to put more manpower onto the Mac version, he added. "Everyone should have their P1 list practically at zero by the end of this week. If you are not going to be able to reach this, let me (or other triage folk) know ASAP so that we can get you some help.
Chrome edged up to 3.6 percent of browser usage for October, its highest showing so far in Net Applications' statistics since the browser's first public release 14 months ago. That's within striking distance of third-place Safari at 4.2 percent, but still well short of second-place Firefox at 24.1 percent and dominant Internet Explorer at 64.6 percent.
Chrome has helped fan the browser war flames even without becoming dominant, though. In particular, it's helped increase the emphasis on performance such as the speed to load the software, load Web pages, and run Web-based JavaScript applications. Here, more than with bookmark sync, Google's chest-thumping has some merit:
"As with every release, this new beta comes with many speed improvements. In particular, as Web applications we use every day become increasingly dynamic, browsers like Google Chrome need to be able to construct and change elements on web pages as fast as possible," said programmers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin in a blog post. "We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30 percent since our current stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests, and by 400 percent since our first stable release."
There has been some slowdown with the arrival of Chrome extensions, though, so Google will have some more optimization work to do to keep the browser in fighting trim.
Updated 9:57 p.m. PST with further details on the Mac OS X beta priority.
Those of you who hate the recent arrival of Yahoo's logo on Flickr now have an easy way to erase it--and get a number of useful features--as long as you're using an edgy version of Chrome.
Fittr Flickr lets you click 'EXIF' to expand a box below the image to show photo details.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Chrome extensions let people customize the browser's behavior, and the Fittr Flickr extension from Gmail programmer Dan Pupius whips Yahoo's photo-sharing site into shape. Some people use extensions for using Delicious bookmarks, banishing ads, and filling out forms, but this is my favorite Chrome extension so far. You can also download Fittr from Download.com.
The Yahoo logo is ugly but not too bothersome in my eyes. Instead, what I like best about Fittr Flickr is its keyboard navigation options. Once the extension is installed, you can type "?" to see the options, but the two I now use a lot are "." and "," to navigate forward and backward through a person's photostream. Typing "s" will star a photo as a favorite, and in a nice Google touch harkening to the vi text editor, "/" will put your cursor in the search field.
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Google's browser now has an extension to use the Web of Trust, a project that lets people rate the trustworthiness of Web sites and see how others have rated them.
The open-source plug-in previously worked only with Firefox and Internet Explorer, but now a version is available for the new developer preview version of Chrome, according to a blog post.
The Web of Trust extension lets people rate Web pages. Clicking an icon in the lower left corner of Chrome pops up this interface.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)It's one of a host of relatively widely used extensions available on other browsers but now on their way to Chrome, whose extensions framework is just getting off the ground. There also are extensions (called add-ons in the Firefox realm) for Delicious and Xmarks, for example.
The extension takes advantage of the newer "mole" feature that lets windows pop up from the bottom of the screen. (The "mole" term originated with the work Google's Gmail team on instant-message windows; closing a number of them is like playing Whack-a-Mole.) However, Web of Trust programmers are considering using a newer extensions possibility called browser actions, which builds an extension interface into a button that appears along the top of the Chrome window.
"Browser Actions look promising though and we're looking forward to using them in future," said programmer Sami Tolvanen in a mailing list announcement. He also offered a list of suggestions for the Chrome extensions interface.
Separately, Google announced a new developer preview version, Chrome 4.0.221.6 for Windows, 4.0.221.8 for Mac OS X, and 4.0.221.8 for Linux. In the Windows version is a new browser action feature, pop-up windows.
