Some serious progress is being made with Chrome, Google’s foray into the web browsing business. Not only is the plugin framework coming together, the Chromium project also started offering regular builds of the browser for Mac OS X (regular Linux builds have been available since March).
The builds for Mac OS X come straight from the Chromium project, the open source effort underlying Google’s Chrome web browser. Chromium for Mac is still very rough around the edges, but new builds appear faster than you can blink. Sadly, they appear to be Intel-only; I tried them on my PowerPC Mac, but that’s a no-go for now. I certainly hope any eventual Google Chrome for Mac releases are available for PowerPC as well.
Moving on to the Windows variant, one of the most requested features for Chrome is a plugin framework, to allow for the same extensibility that for instance Firefox can offer its users. Chrome 2.0.180.0, released in the dev channel, includes the plumbing for such an extension framework (detailed changelog).
The team working on the extension framework detailed their progress in a post on Google Groups. “The extensions posse would like to point out that as of today’s dev channel
release (2.0.180.0), extensions are starting to be a bit more useful. We can
now put little bits of UI in the chrome of Chrome, and some of the APIs are
starting to come together.”
There’s a how-to page available for building Chrome extensions, as well as a page with a few sample extensions.
All in all, it appears Chrome is growing up. The Mac version is coming together, as well as the plugin framework. I continue my idle hope that there will be builds without this framework built-in, but I guess that will be in vain.
I wish Opera started an extension framework too. User scripts and widgets don’t cut the mustard…
I have tried several Chrome extensions (GMail inbox counter, bookmark synchronizer, Adsweep, FlashBlock, etc…). It works as expected but I don’t know if the extension framework offers auto-updates just yet.
.. perfected adblocking.
I hacked together a prototype ad-blocking extension and it seems there are still some game stopping bugs.
For instance, the content filtering interface one would use is severely limited in syntax compared to what the firefox extension does. If you try to use the wildcard that SHOULD match everything, it doesn’t. So it’ll be a couple more releases at least before this interface is usable for adblock.
Edited 2009-05-15 15:55 UTC
Most FF extensions do not need to be written in C++. JS, XUL are enough to define an extension. Even an advanced one!
So many extensions with almost no adaptation works through multiple versions of OSs and Firefoxes.
Do someone know if Chrome have support of suchlike framework? And there is support for ABP or equivalent in it? (the main reason I was stand away from Chrome as the net works much faster)
JS is the preffered (and now I think only) extension language. Graphical elements are constructed with HTML. They have a python script for creating a package (like a zip file they say, haven’t played with it) for all the files in your extension.
I hacked together (post above) an adblock extension, but necessary functionality like pattern matching still seems buggy.
PPC Macs are dead. Few (if any) new apps will ever be compiled for PPC again. Chalk this up to the fact that new-to-the-Mac developers want a painless Mac-quisition adventure, and PPC machines are getting scarce.
Maybe you can ask Google to enable universal binaries. Then again, maybe they depend on the x86 platform to make certain internal features work.
AFAIK V8 currently features only a x86 backend so PPC is out.
I think google need to fix chome so works correctly before they try porting it and do any work on framework. Chome has lot of bigs like java applet plugin not working and rendering issues like transpain textboxs displaying as black box. Get your act togetter google!
Funny, the two most common complaints I always see are A) lack of Mac/Linux versions, and B) lack of Adblock. Might be because I browse OSAlert and Slashdot though.