Dec 10, 2010 15:33 GMT  ·  By

Things change fast when it comes to Google Chrome so it sure seems like a lot more than a year since extensions have been introduced. Yet the Chrome extensions online gallery opened its doors precisely a year ago. The really interesting part is that the gallery has already been replaced by something bigger and better, the Chrome Web Store.

"It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been a full year since we launched the Google Chrome extensions gallery," Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer at Google, writes on the Chromium blog.

Along with the announcement, Google released some stats to show how much the gallery has grown in the past year. Since launch, over 8,500 extensions and 1,500 have been added.

At launch, there were just 300 extensions to pick from, a number that has grown several times. It's not even close to the size of Firefox's add-ons gallery, but Mozilla's platform had quite a few years head start.

Considering that many Firefox add-ons have been abandoned and are not supported by newer versions, comparing the total number of add-ons is not exactly fair.

In terms of usage, Chrome says that over 70 million extensions and themes have been installed in the past year. In fact, on in three Chrome users have at least one extension installed.

Meanwhile, the developers haven't been standing still and have been working on adding new functionality and features in Chrome for extensions.

"New APIs for things like context menus, history, and cookies. Integration between extensions and HTML5 features like notifications and geolocation. Extension sync, so your favorite extensions are always with you. Native support for Greasemonkey user scripts," Boodman listed some of the things introduced in Chrome in the past year.

But this is only the beginning. With the introduction of the Chrome Web Store, just a few days ago, extension and theme creators have a lot more opportunities.

The Web Store is bound to get more exposure than the extensions gallery ever did and developers can now sell their extensions just like web app makers can.