14 DAY TRIAL // Google introduced extension support in Chrome late last year along with the launch of the extensions online gallery. One of the biggest things holding users from switching from Firefox to Chrome was and still is add-ons support. Now, more than six months after the Chrome extensions gallery was revealed, let’s check in to see how Google’s move has fared.
There are 6,153 extensions available in the online gallery. It’s hard to pin down how many Firefox add-ons are out there. The total number of add-ons created is of no use since many of them, the ones that have not been updated, won’t work with the latest versions of Firefox. Still, the number of add-ons available to the regular Firefox user is still significantly larger than the extensions available for Chrome.
Easier the compare, though, are the usage numbers. Firefox boasts more than two billion add-on downloads to date. The browser has a five-year head start, Chrome’s most popular extension is used by 1.1 million people and gets 113,000 new downloads every week. The most popular add-on for Firefox gets about 884,000 downloads every week. It has been downloaded by 89 million people. So it looks like, scale wise, Chrome still has a lot of catching up to do.
Fittingly, the most popular add-on for both web browsers is AdBlock. Though they share the name, the two add-ons are unrelated. From then on, the top add-ons, by popularity, differ for the two browsers, representative of their respective audiences. The top Firefox add-ons tend to be more mainstream, like online video downloaders, but, interestingly, also developer-oriented. At the same time, the most popular extensions for Chrome tend to be the ones created by Google itself, or catering to Google services, Gmail checkers, Google Translate, the Docs PDF viewer and so on.
The top 10 Google Chrome extension as of August 2010 (lifetime users / weekly downloads)