Google’s new Web browser eventually will support add-ons and user scripts à la Firefox Add-ons and Greasemonkey. It said by Google engineer Ojan Vafai during a panel discussion on the future of Web browsers at Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Friday. Additionally, Vafai says Google will work to ensure its extensions are more stable than Firefox, where “there are problems with instability.” That statement may sound like slap in the face to Mozilla, but Chrome will likely be a boon no matter which of two browsers you prefer.

Google Chrome was released earlier this month and saw almost 2 million downloads in the first week alone, raising the visibility of Chrome as a strong new competitor to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer. It does a number of things differently from either, such as isolating browser tabs so that each one is treated almost like a separate instance of the browser for reliability purposes. You can install add-ons for web browsers like Firefox that do everything from turn the browser into an FTP client to provide email notifications. And there are user scripts that will let you change the way you interact with web pages. Google Chrome doesn’t currently support either type of extensions. But it will.

Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 12:11 pm | by Kur-nia-one |