14 DAY TRIAL // With Google Chrome getting extensions a few months ago, it looked like the battle was finally heating up between the two biggest 'alternative' web browsers on the market. The number of extensions for Google Chrome has been growing steadily, it's now close to 4,000 extensions, but it's still nowhere near the number of Firefox add-ons. Still, some Firefox users must have believed that they were missing out on something, which is why we now have the "Google Chrome extensions manager" add-on for Firefox.
In case you haven't guessed it yet, the Google Chrome extensions manager allows you to install Chrome extensions on Firefox. Well, that may be a bit of an overstatement, it doesn't work that well at the moment, as it's pretty much an alpha release, but the idea behind it is certainly original. When it will be complete, however, it should allow users to run any Chrome extension in Firefox just like it would run natively.
The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem and it isn't that much of a hurdle technically, though it's not a walk in the park either. Since Google Chrome extensions are just pieces of JavaScript, Firefox should be more than able to run them natively. The problem is matching the set of APIs Google provides and finding equivalents for all of them in the Mozilla browser.
At the moment, the "Google Chrome extensions manager" add-on is far from complete. It failed to work at all on Firefox 3.6 on Linux, but others have had more success. Even if you get it to work, most Chrome extensions won't have 100-percent functionality, as plenty of the APIs haven't been implemented yet. The Google Chrome extensions manager add-on for Firefox is available in the Mozilla repository and instructions on how to use it are available on the add-on's homepage. Maybe you'll have better luck. [via Download Squad]