Yahoo has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google's browser.
Extensions must still be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology is immature. However, Google is steadily addressing the concern that its browser lacks one of Mozilla Firefox's notable features — add-ons.
"Delicious extension [alpha version] for Google Chrome is now available," said Amit Papnai of the Delicious team in a mailing list posting on Tuesday. "This is a light version of the extension and allows you to sign in and post bookmarks to your Delicious account."
The Delicious extension for Chrome shows the logo in the address bar. Clicking on it will pop up a dialogue box as a new miniature webpage.
Extensions can be powerful tools used to customise a browser's interface or add significant features. In an effort to ease programming difficulties, Chrome's extensions technology uses the same interface techniques as web pages, a method Mozilla has adopted for its Jetpack Firefox extensions project at Mozilla Labs.
Delicious allows people to store, tag, describe and share bookmarks, while the add-on simplifies use of the service directly through the browser.
Also on Tuesday, Nick Baum released a Twitter add-on for Chrome called Chritter.
Google has added a rough, but workable, interface for managing Chrome extensions, including uninstalling them — simply type "chrome://extensions/" into the address bar.
Extensions compatibility can be difficult to maintain, as the release of Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday illustrated.
"We're working on pushing out a new Gears version that supports Firefox 3.5," said Google programmer Aaron Boodman on Monday on a mailing list for Gears, a Firefox add-on that among other things can enable offline access to the Gmail web application. "We typically wait until the official 'gold' release of Firefox is pushed, because otherwise, we keep having to do new builds every time a new release candidate is pushed."
One of Firefox's most popular add-ons is AdBlock Plus, which suppresses online advertisements. With Google's business dependent on advertising, skeptics have said they don't expect Chrome to ever to support the technology.
However, in a December design document about Chrome extensions, Boodman highlighted AdBlock Plus as an example of an extension that Google would like to support. In addition, discussion of ad blocking in Chrome has surfaced on the Chrome extensions mailing list.
