14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been focusing a lot on extensions lately with Chrome and the ecosystem is growing steadily with several thousand extensions in the online gallery already. However, there are plenty of people who think Google could step it up a bit and the company seems to agree, which is why it has started introducing some 'experimental' APIs that expand the platform with some interesting, new functionality.
"You might have already noticed this, but we now have some APIs that we’re referring to as experimental. The idea is that we can add new APIs to the platform that may not be ready for prime time. This allows you to play with these APIs and give us feedback before they’re final, which in turn helps us get them out to everybody more quickly," Erik Kay, software engineer at Google, wrote.
Google has released two experimental APIs so far, which have a rather narrow focus and applicability, but could prove very interesting if taken advantage of in a compelling way. The processes API enables developers to access Chrome's process model and get info on any of the opened tabs. This could prove useful for metrics extensions, for example one to measure the CPU burden of the web pages loaded, or even as a developer's tool to get a measure on the performance of a piece of web code or an entire page.
The other API, the Chrome history API, looks a bit strange at first glance. As the name implies, it enables developers to access a user's browsing history, but the curious part is that it also allows an extension built using the API to modify the history. That is a potentially pretty dangerous thing to do, as it could be exploited to cover up the tracks of some malicious code perhaps or, more likely, to siphon the history data with less than noble intentions in mind.
Google hasn't had any mishaps with the online extensions gallery and it's very likely that it would review any extensions built with this functionality, like it already does with the ones that access a user's local files, so maybe there's no reason to be concerned just yet. And, in any case, the APIs are at this point, clearly, experimental, which means that they are very likely to change over time. Google warns developers that this may happen, but asks them to start using the experimental APIs so that development can move at a faster pace.