Google Chrome has only had extensions available for a few months, but it already has a great collection of add-ons that will boost your browsing experience. We look at a handful of extensions that let you manage tabs effectively, learn more about the sites you browse, and read feeds with panache.
Feedly syncs with Google Reader, so Feedly is a no-hassle add-on to work with Reader. You can comfortably switch back and forth, so there’s no problem using Feedly on the desktop and accessing Reader on your mobile device (for example).
If you’re a Google Reader user, you’ll probably also want to grab an extension to subscribe to RSS feeds from the toolbar. Inexplicably, this feature isn’t included in Google by default. Google does provide an RSS Subscription Extension, though, and it allows you to subscribe to feeds directly from the Omnibox. Google’s extensions supports Google Reader, iGoogle, Yahoo, and Bloglines out of the box and can be configured to work with other feed readers as well.
Even better for Google Reader is the Chrome Reader extension. This one puts a icon in the Omnibar that gives a one-click method for subscribing to feeds for Google Reader and lets you customize the feed name and specify which folder(s) you’d like to put the feed in.
Analyzing Sites with BuiltWith
A quick hat-tip to Mashable for this next extension, because I wouldn’t have stumbled on it otherwise. The BuiltWith Technology Profiler examines a page and gives you the skinny on how a site is built, the technologies it uses, the analytics, what the site is hosted on, advertising network(s), and more. If you want a quick profile of a site you’re browsing, the BuiltWith Technology Profiler is the tool for you.
The BuiltWith Technology Preview in Action
You won’t always be able to get results using this extension. It works on most sites, but doesn’t work with pages loaded over SSL, and might return a 403 error depending on the remote site’s configuration. If you want to get a look at overall trends, the company behind the extension keeps a site with trends showing all of the various technologies, ad networks, and so on. You can search by site or technology.
Chrome Calling
Fans of the Speed Dial feature in Opera can replicate the experience in Chrome with the Speed Dial extension. After whipping the extension onto Chrome, just click the Speed Dial bar in the Omnibar and select “Add Current Page” to add a new site to the dial, or click Open to get to the speed dial.
The Speed Dial page also displays a row at the top for your bookmarks, the recently closed bar you see in new tabs in Chrome, and a search box. Speed dial is also themeable. It comes with seven color themes out of the box, and allows you to set a background image if you like that sort of thing.
To change the number of dials, change your themes or other options, click the Options button on the Speed Dial page. You can even hide the Speed Dial Omnibar button if you get sick of looking at it, but make sure you know the shortcuts!
Finding Chrome Extensions
Chrome now has nearly 3,000 extensions listed on its gallery. There’s plenty to choose from, though it’s not always easy to find the good stuff. Google could do a bit more to showcase extensions by function. The Google Chrome Extensions site organizes extensions by most popular, most recent, top rated, and a selection of featured extensions.
Naturally, you can also search the extensions site, but the site lacks a way to browse by category. It’d be useful to be able to see all extensions for Web development, or for tab management, etc., instead of having to search and hope you’re getting the right terms to match the type of extension you’re looking for.
Another site to check out is the independent Chrome Extensions site that predates Google’s official gallery. You’ll see a lot of duplication on the two sites, but the Chrome Extensions site is so much nicer to navigate.
Finally, there’s UserScripts.org, which hosts thousands of GreaseMonkey scripts. Originally focused on GreaseMonkey and Firefox, the site is also relevant to Chrome users since Google Chrome started supporting many GreaseMonkey scripts natively — without the need for the GreaseMonkey add-on. I’ve tried several scripts with success, though not every script is going work with Chrome. Some experimentation may be required.
If you have a favorite Chrome extension (or Firefox add-on), let us know about it in the comments!
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at
jzb@zonker.net and follow him on
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Comments on "Customize Chrome for Better Browsing"
I loved the gmail checker and orkut checker extension.
I was pretty much addicted to checking these two sites once every four minutes to look for new mails/scraps and wasted a lot of productive time! These extensions notify about any new mail/scrap, and I can now focus on doing something useful.
A lot of hype has hit the \’net regarding Chrome and it amazes me that so many people are willing to sacrifice their privacy to use that crap. Personally, I\’ve decided to avoid it, just as I\’ve removed Google\’s search from my machines in lieu of Scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org/).
I hope you\’ve been tracking the progress of SRware\’s Iron Brower for Linux. It would be nice to see some updated information on its status. The less google in my (and probably your) life, the better.
Well extensions are all well and good how about some basic documentation for Chrome under Linux? The man page mentions \”hundreds\” of switches (which is probably more like 50+) but only documents 6 of them.
I have yet to be able to get chrome \”profiles\” working the way the \”-P\” option allows with Firefox. The process model is also difficult to navigate. While the early process model (one process per tab) has strong arguments (several academic and position papers explain the reasoning), early implementations ran out of processes for complex sessions (hundreds of tabs) on typical Linux systems (where process limits are standard). Google seems to have constrained current functioning to 32+3 processees (which destroys their much vaunted model). And of course chrome suffers from excessive memory use (compared to firefox) and still has the large session restore problem (due to spinner/throbber CPU use) which Firefox has but Opera does not (due to its use of static incomplete page load status indicators). All of these browsers suffer from the inability to completely reload complex sessions due to server timeouts on non-responsive connections. All of them suffer from excessive CPU use on large (but inactive) sessions (i.e. they ARE NOT GREEN) in large part due to their inability to manage polling on open file handles (sometimes sockets, sometimes pipes) as well as Javascript activity (largely dictated by poor Javascript design by providers).
Try to get your system to run GREEN with a large session (dozens of windows, hundreds of tabs) even with all of the windows minimized. Run a strace on the active processes (or in Chrome the processes which accumulate CPU time) — learn what is going on behind the curtain.