Chrome Extensions

There has been a lot of talk in the press over the last couple of weeks about the Windows 7 ‘black screen of death’. Named after its cousin (or should that be FAMILY), the ‘blue screen of death’, this problem seems to be afflicting people across the globe. At first it was blamed on programming errors by Microsoft (a fact which was quickly denied by them), and then on Malware installs by careless clickers – now the conclusion seems to be that the fault lies with….nobody.

Security firms have been racking their brains and testing hundreds of install configurations to try to find the root of these problems, but they have only managed to say that in effect, ‘it could be anything’. They know of at least ten different issues which could cause these problems (as well as many different types of malware and crapware) – but there isn’t one which can be identified as ‘the cause’.

But perhaps it doesn’t really matter what is causing the issues, but the perception of them.

Twitter has been on fire with calls for refunds of Microsoft products – and people who even won competitions and had free copies of Windows 7 have complained of frequent crashes and – yes, you guessed it – the return of the black (and blue) screens of death. It seems that whatever Microsoft have lined up to try to stop complaints, they always run in to a chorus of dissent – and that means there is a gap in the market for a new competitor.

Enter, Google Chome OS.

This week also saw the release of a ‘diet’ version of Google’s brand new operating system, able to be loaded onto a 1gb memory stick and dished out in seconds. It can boot from that USB (or even from an SD card) and so does not need static memory. Google has previously announced that it won’t even support ‘normal’ hard disks, opting to be specially configured for ‘solid state’ drives which mean that it will be lightning fast (and able to boot in around 3 seconds, if the rumours are to be believed).

But will an open source solution be able to defeat the developing might of Microsoft? Perhaps these cries of annoyance about blue and black screens, of viruses and errors stem from the fact that Microsoft is seen as the bad guy, and the Chrome OS might be the ‘young pretender’. The problem is, once Chrome is released, will these people who hate Microsoft for their monopoly over the browser and operating system markets (and decade of dominance in this field) vote with their feet and actually support a system which is almost guaranteed to have teething problems? We will see.

When people think about the browser wars, they immediately hark back to Netscape and the glory days of the Internet, when it was too complicated for stupid people to use – when you could go into a chat room without someone trying to pick you up – when you couldn’t get free hosting for your website without a huge banner at the top and a popup in front (ok that might not have changed much)…well there is a new war coming.

Google is positioning itself to release its Chrome OS (Operating system), which although is not seen as a direct competitor to Windows, will make people at Microsoft think that it is just the first salvo in the big G’s attack on the big M (and I don’t mean McDonalds).

The war begins

But has the first shot actually already been fired by Google? The Chrome web browser, which will form the basis of the operating system, has been out for more than a year now, and developers have been playing around with it, tweaking it and testing it. This week saw the official launch by Google of the Developers area for Chrome extensions. Extensions is a buzzword which Google have been throwing around a lot in relation to plugins and addons for the browser. But what impact will they have?

Firefox was IE’s biggest competitor – in fact it still is – but a lot of the people who turned to Chrome when it was released had become slightly disappointed by the ‘bloat’ that Firefox had picked up, with its increasing number of ‘must have’ plugins and addons. Chrome seemed like a breath of fresh air – loading quickly, running quickly, rendering quickly – but now these people will need to face the possibility that Chrome will go the same way as Firefox, unless Google is careful.

Latecomer to the party

That said, Google is in the prime position to deal with this issue. They’re the ‘latecomer’ to the browser party, that is true, but that also means that they have been able to learn from every mistake that both Firefox and IE have made, and build their avoidance into their gameplan. Whether they will have enough momentum to overtake one or both of their competitors remains to be seen, but the future looks bright for the new kid on the block.

The first thing that Google has done right with Chrome, is not rush anything. When Firefox was in development, there was so much fanfair and hype about the potential competitor to Internet Explorer that it seemed like the programmers were rushing to get their product out there as it was a ‘sure fire’ hit. When it was finally released, many people were surprised at how similar it was to IE in many ways – and how distinctly not revolutionary it was. Then the real hard work began – now it was in the wild, it was time for the support staff and the actual product to eat into the market share of Microsoft.

When the Chrome browser was introduced to the Internet, Google did a good job of playing down expectations and making sure everyone realised that this was a project for the long term and not a war that could be won instantly. Everyone knew that they were taking a shot at MS, but nobody admitted it. Now developers have almost ‘in secret’ being working on their Chrome extensions – and it’s the start of a new age of the browser wars. Let’s see what happens!

Google recently caused big news in the browser wars when it officially announced the opening of its Developer upload directory for new addons to its Chrome browser. This has massive implications on everyone in the community.

One of the biggest complaints of webusers up to this point has been Chrome’s lack of extensions and plugins. Basically every one of the 5% of internet users who has installed Chrome and use it on a regular basis also had Firefox or IE installed alongside it, so they could use them when Chrome didn’t live up to their expectations.

Now their worries are over. Developers have had access to a special version of their browser and source code for nearly a year, and so there should now be a large number of plugins and addons available to share with the community right now. We’ve already had access to Google’s own ‘example’ addons – such as the ‘add to RSS’ extension and the Gmail status checker – but it will be good to finally have access to the minds of the ‘community’ as well as the big G itself.

If you need to find instructions on upgrading your Chrome browser to the latest developer version (so that you can use the extensions), check out Chrome upgrade instructions here.

We here at Chrome-Extensions.org have obviously already downloaded, installed and tested a load of these addons – we’ll be giving our views later on, so stay tuned for our reviews and opinions, as well as all of the latest news.