14 DAY TRIAL // Tucked away in a Google Chrome status update post for developers on the official Chromium blog is one tidbit of information that is easy to underestimate. The Google Chrome online extensions gallery now hosts more than 3,000 extensions just three months after being launched. That may or may not sound like a big number, but its importance is evident when put into context, Firefox has just two to four times as many add-ons and this after years of development.
Knowing how many Chrome extensions are out there, or, more accurately, how many are available in the official gallery, is easy, browsing any of the 'Most popular,' 'Most recent' or 'Top rated' categories will display the total number of extensions as well. At this very moment, there are 3,267 extensions.
Finding out how many add-ons there are on Mozilla's own repository and how many of those are for Firefox is a trickier proposition, as TechCrunch has also found. Adding up all the add-ons listed by category indicates that there are 11,637 Firefox add-ons at this very moment. However, there are bound to be add-ons listed under multiple categories, so this number doesn't really say that much.
Mozilla's statistics page says there are over 6,000 add-ons, "more than for any other browser," but it's unclear how old this metric is. In any case, add-ons have been one of Firefox's selling points since its inception and developers have been creating add-ons for the browser for many years. On the other hand, developers only really started creating Chrome extensions three months ago, though support for extensions had been introduced in Chrome several months before that. At this pace, it should take very little time before Chrome catches up to Firefox and inevitably surpasses it in terms of the number of extensions available.
So, how did Google achieve this? Well, its great marketing power can't be underestimated and Chrome itself has been growing at a very healthy pace in the recent months, but this alone doesn't account for the big number of extensions. One very important role was played by the early decision to base extensions on common web technologies, like JavaScript, ensuring that there were plenty of people with the skills to create extensions for Chrome, which compensated for some of the disadvantages of choosing this path.
This seemed to have paid off and one great indicator that this may be the best path is that Mozilla is also working on an add-on platform, Jetpack, based on JavaScript, very similar in many respects to the way Chrome implemented the feature. Jetpack is still under development and is currently undergoing a major rewrite, with all the code being created from scratch, but, while Mozilla won't make any guarantees or even claims, if everything goes smoothly, there is a strong possibility that it will be integrated with Firefox 4.0 or is a much more viable option by the time the next major Firefox release arrives.