One of the things that make Firefox so popular is its support for user-created add-ons. These are so varied in functionality and features, depending on the browser, that the main development team couldn't possibly include all of them and in fact many users may not want certain features that others couldn't live without. Last week at the Google I/O Developers Conference it was confirmed that Google Chrome would get a system called extensions, similar to Firefox's add-ons. In fact, alpha developer builds already have limited support for them and it didn't take long for the first extensions for Chrome to appear.

A post over at geektechnica lists some of the new Chrome extensions and how to enable and install them. Even though developer builds have built-in support for extensions, it isn't enabled by default. So the first thing to do is right click on the shortcut for Chrome, go to Properties and then add “–enable-extentions” to the target path making sure to leave a space in before it. Then to install extensions you will have to go to the site where they are hosted and click on the download link. To uninstall them type “chrome://extensions/” in the address bar and you will get a list of all currently installed extensions.

Cleeki is an extension for Chrome that adds functionality similar to Accelerators in IE8. Highlighting a portion of text will bring up a list of things you can do with the text like searching in different sites, Google Maps etc. IE8 accelerators can also be imported with it.

Adsweep is an ad blocker similar to the adblock plus Firefox add-on but with a more limited list of options.

Page Rank for Chrome. This extension does what the name implies, meaning it checks the Google PageRank of the site you are currently visiting.

CustomNewTab lets you customize your new tab page with several options. It can be configured to redirect directly to a page of your choice or remove sections from the dashboard that you don't use. You will have to modify an XML configuration file for yourselves but this is a limitation related to Chrome not the extension.

Chrome's support for extensions is very early in development and bugs and crashes are to be expected so we do not recommend using them except for testing purposes for non-critical tasks.