There Are Already 500 Chrome Extensions. They'll Work On Mac Chrome By Week's End.
And it’s easy to see why after tonight’s presentation. Two software engineers on the Chrome team, Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay built a working in extension live from scratch in front of the audience in about five minutes. And it wasn’t just a demo “Hello World” extension, it was a useful one that can pop-up a Gmail message window populated with a link to the page you’re on.
The reason they’re so easy to build is because they use the same technology that any web developer will already be familiar with. “Extensions are just web pages,” Kay noted.
Another thing of note said tonight was that Chrome extensions will be working on the new Chrome for Mac by the end of the week, Google expects. To be clear, this will be on the dev channel (which you can find on this page) and not the beta channel just yet. Full support (and the first actual release of Chrome for Mac) is expected by early 2010.
This dev channel Mac support of extensions shouldn’t surprise users of Chromium, the open-source browser that Chrome is built-off of. Extensions are currently working in the latest Mac builds of Chromium, but Google accidentally shut off the ability to install them (you can learn how to easily turn them back on here). And with the beta channel now out for Mac, the dev channel versions of Chrome will be built directly off of newer Chromium builds.