Google developers reveal choices

Jul 16, 2010 13:57 GMT  ·  By

Ever since Google introduced Chrome extensions, developers have been churning out new tools and enhancements for the web browser at a steady rate. There are thousands of extensions now available and, while the online gallery does a decent job at exposing the most popular ones and Google even features the ones it deems worthy for better exposure, the company has now revealed the results of a rather informal internal survey to find out what are the most popular extensions used by Googlers working on Chrome.

“This week I sent a note to Googlers about some of the Chrome team's favorite extensions. So many of them asked if they could share the list with people outside the company that I thought I would just do it for them. Here it is. We're proud of the Chrome browser and the great extensions that its developer community has created, and we hope you enjoy them,” Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Google, wrote.

So, without further ado, here’s what Chrome’s own developers use:

Opinion Cloud Google Voice AutoPager Turn Off the Lights Google Dictionary After the Deadline Invisible Hand Secbrowsing Tineye Slideshow
Google Docs/PDF Viewer Readability Chromed Bird Feedsquares ScribeFire Note Anywhere Instant Messaging Notifier Remember the Milk Extension.fm
Some of the choices are obvious, the Google Docs/PDF Viewer being one, but others are a bit more interesting. For example the After the Deadline extension created by Automattic, a company who’s other product, WordPress, you may have heard of. The extension does spelling, style and grammar checking on any text input box in Chrome, very handy for emails, blogs, Google Docs and so on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Docs’s new document editor.

A few other extensions show that Chrome developers are true believers in the cloud. For Twitter, they use Chromed Bird, for IM they use Instant Messaging Notifier, for music they use Extension.fm and so on. All of these extensions are available in Google’s online repository and can be installed with just a couple of clicks.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here. Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here. Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.