The Mind of Alex

Chrome, out of beta, promoted on the Google home page, and rocking a 3.0 build, still does not support extensions. Well, sure, if you are running the latest developer build, you can enable them through the command line. Can you guess how many normal consumers know how to do that? If you held up zero fingers, you are a winner.

Cnet is reporting that Delicious has now built a very light-weight (read: does little) Delicious plugin to let you save links to you account. Not that this is at all groundbreaking, but the fact that this type of development is worthy of a headline on Cnet shows a problem with Chrome: when will plugins actually work? For everyone, without extra work? Google seems to be mum on the topic.

FireFox, at least personally, was made into a serious threat to the Microsoft browser hegemony by its endless customizability through plugins. Plugins for everything. Developer plugins, social plugins, porn plugins, ad-blocking plugins, everything and anything that could be thought up. Chrome just loads quickly and has the best browser bar in the market. It works for me, as a dyed-in-the-wool Chrome user, but for the FiredFox fanatic with a host of plugins, he is not going anywhere.

If Google actually wants Chrome to succeed, plugins and extensions should be their top priority. Perhaps everyone at Google made the switch to Chrome from IE6. Who knows?