Build Your Own Browser Extensions For Google Chrome

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[Ryan] posted a writeup on developing extensions for Google Chrome. The extension system utilizes HTML with a JavaScript API which is still sparsely documented. After taking us through his twitter bar extension project, he concludes that the Chrome extensions are not nearly as versatile as what we’re used to seeing with Firefox. That being said, this is a move in the right direction for the young browser.

[related: Google Chrome roundup]

6 thoughts on “Build Your Own Browser Extensions For Google Chrome

  1. @Jason – Google’s V8 engine is, I believe, a lot more comprehensive than what you see in Firefox, and I suspect that’s why they’re providing access through Javascript. I suspect what we’ll see is a lot more Chrome V8 templates created, giving a lot of surface area for Javascript extensions, once they get basic functionality out.

  2. Jason Knight, actually, Greasmonkey was released first (version 0.2.5, April 2005), before Opera 8.0 b3 which introduced that feature. Greasmonkey was apparently directly inspired by a site-specific extension (see http://wiki.greasespot.net/Greasemonkey) in 2004. But Opera’s support had been in production for the year previous to release, and had been in discussion at Opera since 2002 (see http://operawiki.info/UserJS#interlude).

    So, Opera was working on the feature itself longer, but Firefox was designed to use Javascript under the hood, so it was simpler to implement and got it first.

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