Good news for those Firefox users who really want to switch to Chrome but fear living a day without extensions, that day is here. Or, at least, near. Google today announced that it was turning on extension support in Chrome by default in all the new developer builds (in Windows) from now on.
Of course, as extension support was largely hidden before, there aren’t many extensions you can use yet with Chrome. But Google has complied a list of a few examples here. These include simple things like a Gmail inbox checker, and an auto-subscribe in Google Reader button for URLs.
Google says this is the first step in its “launch process” for the feature in Chrome proper. Of course, it’s worth noting that regular (non-dev) Chrome users are stuck in version 2.x while the dev releases are in 4.x now, as ReadWriteWeb pointed out yesterday. So it’s not clear if extensions will be in Chrome 3.0, whenever that becomes official (it’s available in the beta channel right now).
Google also notes that it has enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on the Mac and Linux builds of Chrome. In the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, extension support is not highlighted, but you can get to it by putting “chrome://extensions/” in the URL box.