I am still juggling between Chrome and Firefox because I have come to depend on a large number of Firefox plug-ins over the years. The day Google Chrome supports all the extensions I use with Firefox I can see myself switch to Chrome completely. Chrome still doesnt officially support extensions. Userscripts and greasemonkey scripts are used to support custom options for the time being. However recent developers builds have alpha extension support built-in to the browser. You will have to download developers builds in order to install these extensions.
-> To Enable extensions on developers build right click chrome shortcut > properties and on the target field add - -enable-extensions after chrome.exe. There should be a space in between. You will need to restart Chrome.
-> To Install extensions go to the extension developer website and click on the download link and it will prompt you to install extension.
-> To Uninstall extensions, on your chrome browser visit this link: chrome://extensions/ and it will list all the extensions currently installed and you can choose to uninstall from there.
1) Cleeki: An extension that mimics the way Accelerators work with IE8. Basically once you highlight a text it prompts a small hovering button and from there you can choose to execute actions like searches, Google maps, translations etc. Perhaps important for IE8 users, Cleeki can import IE8 accelerators to Google Chrome.
2) Adsweep: This is a useful ad blocker that does a very good job of blocking ads, but not very extensive in options like adblock plus for Firefox yet.
3) Page Rank for Chrome: This is a nice little extension that does pagerank checks on website you visit. Its actually faster and better than the Firefox plug-in I currently use, which doesnt support checking pagerank for individual pages. Only checks for domain.
4) CustomNewTab: A useful plugin that changes the way a new tab functions by customizing the dashboard. This can be useful since currently when you open a new tab in chrome instead of visiting your homepage (like Google or yahoo) it shows the most visited websites in panels (among other things), with Customnewtab extension you can configure Chrome to redirect new tab to your home page or change the way it currently looks. Installing the plugin and editing the preference is easy enough but when it comes to applying the configuration you have to manually edit config.xml and insert the XML code, which can be a turn off for some users. Hopefully this will change in the future or even better Chrome will have this function built-in.
The Google Chrome extension framework itself is in early stage of development and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. As it becomes more stable and matures we will see many more creative and useful chrome extensions coming out. If you know of any interesting Google Chrome native extensions (not scripts) feel free to share it with us.
