14 DAY TRIAL // Undoubtedly, a key aspect of Mozilla’s success on the browser market can be attributed to Firefox extensive customization capabilities, and in fact, early on in the life of Chrome, Google promised support for extensions for its own breed of open source browser. With the latest update to Google Chrome, the Mountain View- based search giant has brought to the table extensions support for the versions of the browser running on top of Windows and Linux. Mac OS X users also running Chrome will have to wait a tad longer in order to be able to customize their browser at the same level as those running Windows and Linux, as Google Chrome extensions did not reach the quality standard necessary for a Beta release as far as Apple customers are concerned.
“When we first launched Google Chrome in September 2008, we knew that we wanted to make it easy for you to customize the browser with extensions. We also wanted to make extensions easy to create and maintain, while preserving Google Chrome's speed and stability. Extensions on Google Chrome accomplishes all these goals: they are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser,” revealed Brian Rakowski, Chrome product manager.
The best way to try out the new extensions from the Mountain View company is to download, install and start test driving the latest iteration of Chrome, namely build 4.0.249.30. Early adopters already familiar with testing releases of Chrome already know that Google essentially kicked up a notch the browser, upgrading the Dev channel bits to the Beta channel.
“We're happy to announce that Google Chrome 4.0.249.30 has been promoted to the Beta channel on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In addition to introducing our first Beta versions on Mac and Linux, this update introduces Google Chrome extensions on Windows and Linux,” stated Mark Larson, from the Google Chrome Team.
While Google Chrome Beta is now up all the way to 4.0.249.30, the browser is just at 4.0.249.25 on the Dev channel. This means that at this point in time, Google Chrome 4.0.249.30 Beta is the most advanced development milestone of Chrome that users can test. And of course, users should not forget that they can now extend Google Chrome in accordance with their preferences.
“If you're on a PC or a Linux machine, you can check out more than 300 extensions in the gallery, including a few cool, useful and cute extensions . Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon,” Rakowski added.
The latest releases of Google Chrome are available for download here.
Internet Explorer 8 is available for download here.
Opera 10.20 Alpha is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.