Posterous theme by Cory Watilo
Keith Rowland

My Life Dock

Sharing stuff that washes up on shore

An entrepreneur in Internet Engineering, Website Deployments, Audio-Video editing, Computers and Electronics, and finally Photography. Hope you enjoy the stuff I post on the web.

TwitterFacebookLinkedIn

Filed under: Extensions

Google Chrome Extensions

Chrome Extensions or (Add-Ons) are used to extend the functions of the Google Chrome and the Chromium browser. The extension mechanism allows regular web developers with some experience with HTML and Javascript to add functions to the browser, either as a browser bar button or behind the scenes function, in three ways:

As a "Content Script", the extra function performs some new action on web pages that you visit. The script resides in the background of the browser and when a certain page or any page is displayed, the content script extension may add content, links, css or any adjustment to the page you desire. See examples below.

As a "Browser Action" extension, extra functions to the browser, regardless of what page you are viewing, can be added. Usually in the form of a button on the browser navigation bar, the extension will cause some popup window to appear and offer to perform some extra functions.

As a "Page Action", the extension will perform some function on the specific page you are viewing.

Chrome Extensions can be a combination of all three and are an easy way to quickly add features for users to enhance their browser experience. The Google Chrome and Chromium developers have made extensions easy to build and rather safe to install.

Examples of a browser extension are:

  • Adding a "Send Via Email" button (Page Action)
  • "[[Twitter]] this page" button (Page Action)
  • "Zoom" the text on every page (Content Script)
  • Synchronize bookmarks (Browser Action)
  • Quickly access some web site snippet (Browser Action)
  • Change FONT to Large Arial Bold on all pages. (Content Script)

    There are now over a thousand Chrome Extensions in the official Google Extension Gallery.

    Not all versions of Google Chrome or the Chromium browser support extension as yet, but shortly they will.

    If you want to build your own extension, you need to know HTML and preferably HTML5, Javascript and the DOM. With this knowledge in hand next visit the extension developer site.

    •  





    My Favorite Chrome Extensions

    XMarks - Allows me to sync my bookmarks with my other computers, including Safari, Firefox and Chrome on Windows. This replaced the FoxMarks program in the early FF days and became a real lifesaver when Google quit supporting the Google Bookmarks sync extension for FireFox. Of course Google Chrome will now support syncing to Google bookmarks, but most Firefox users have moved to using XMarks and so this extension will allow them to stay there. If you are going to live in Chromium all the time, then Google Bookmarks will be fine.

    Email This Page - Add a missing feature to the browser to Send/EMail the link of a web page to someone. Once installed, use the options to select GMail or leave alone to default to your system email program. I could not understand why Google Chrome never had this simple feature as part of the standard feature set. Now anyone with a little creativity can build a Link Emailer extension. This one is simple and works.

    Evernote Clipper - Allows me to continue to clip stuff from websites into my Evernote notebooks. Evernote is the very best in online / offline note storage. Your clips are saved BOTH on the Evernote servers and your local system using a local client version of the software. This extension works with the online website to post up a note from any web page you are looking at. It uploads without spawning the local software.

    AutoZoom - This extension is even better than the Chrome/FireFox zoom feature. Not only does to cause Chromium to remember the zoom setting for every page you visit (which Chrome won't do), it allows you to set a default zoom size for all new pages you visit. This is my favorite extension so far, as I have a large screen and always had to manually zoom each new site I visited to be more readable. Now Chromium saves the day and my eyes!

    AdThwart - The popular ad blocking extension of Firefox is AdBlock Plus. This extension while not the same is close enough. It uses the same subscription database as AdBlock. I still see some ads come through (as I did with AdBlock) and I see partial ad displays showing up and then they get removed by the extension. So I'm not sure if it really stops the downloading of the ads, but I haven't really tested this thoroughly. I'm sure it will get better with time. Update: The AdBLock developers are posting their extension as they develop it also. So you might try that one too as they bring it up to speed. Another beautiful thing about Chrome/Chromium is the easy way to turn on/off extensions without restarting the browser!

    I'm looking for more good extensions, but it is hard to find them as it seems that since the extension developing process is so easy, that the stupidest things are showing up, not really extensions, but bookmarks/webpages made into extensions. Not very useful. I'm thinking the Extension Gallery will start looking more like the iPhone App Store than Firefox Add-Ons.