Chrome Adds Extensions, Gmail & Calendar Get Upgrades

Author Gordon Kelly
Published 15th May 2009
Chrome Adds Extensions, Gmail & Calendar Get Upgrades
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You wanted it, you got it: Chrome is getting extensions! Well kinda.

Breaking from Menlo Park HQ today is news Google has finally enabled third party extensions for its lightening quick, if race stripped, Chrome browser. The catch is currently they exist only in the newly launched developer build and even then are disabled by default.

If you're feeling confident however grab the build and start it with "-enable-extensions" and from here you can test out a number of samples in CRX format which have been posted to the Chromium Developer Documentation site (including a very handy Gmail extension). At present an extension can also only be removed by deleting its folder and restarting Chrome.


Google did promise Chrome extensions by May, so in essence it has delivered though I can't see a consumer ready version before June at the earliest.

In related Google news The company has apologised for what it is describing as a "traffic jam" on its services last night:

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," explained Google SVP of Operations Urs Hoelzle. "As a result, about 14 per cent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again."


As something of a plus however Google has upgraded Gmail with the ability to import contacts and mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL plus many more for those looking to make the (in my opinion a wise) migration to the service. Google Calendar has also integrated Tasks allowing users to input them directly into their day-to-day schedule which should prove extremely handy.

Links:
Chrome Extensions: How To
Google Traffic Jam Apology
Gmail Import Options
Google Calendar Tasks

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comment hank said on 17th May 2009

@ohmz

Firefox LOL - yeah I score it low on bloatware, terrible crashes, and a hideous habit of running ghost processes, which is cured faastest by a restart. I make ... more

comment ffrankmccaffery said on 17th May 2009

I agree with an earlier poster in that ie8 has advanced enough now to meet the needs for the majority of computer users aswell as being a whole lot safer and as such negates the ne... more

comment Gordon said on 18th May 2009

For me, the killer feature in Firefox is search engine keywords:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/search+bar#Keywords
Lastpass also carried a lot of weight for me:... more

comment Ohmz said on 18th May 2009

@ Gordon, I've used Lastpass for a while now, it's great.

And I had no idea about the search engine keywords. I just tried it and it works beautifully! Tha... more

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