Google's Chrome Extension Library is one step closer

Chromium and Chrome Dev: Google's hosted Chrome Extension Library now has a landing page instead of a redirect to chrome.google.com or just google.com.

This appears to be new this morning, though links to this page appeared in the New Tab Page of both Chromium and the Chrome Dev Branch a few days ago. I thought it odd that Google would start putting out links to a page that didn't exist yet, but they seem to be rectifying that quickly.

Another thing I noticed is that the site is secured. Obviously they are taking the security of extension installing very seriously, just like Mozilla.

Of course there has been a great collection of Chrome/Chromium extensions over at ChromeExtensions.org for a while now. It seems there are a few new extensions added every day. My favorites:

• Google RSS Reader: Gives you a nice easy way to preview and subscribe to feeds in Google Reader
• Google Wave Checker: Notifies you of new Waves
• Gmail Checker: Notifies you of new Gmails
• Bit.ly Shorten Url: Quick access to shorten the url of the page you are currently on.

Chrome on Linux

I have been a Chrome user since I first heard about it shortly after it was released in beta. I have watched it grow and become a beautiful and incredibly usable piece of quality software. However, since I spend most of my time in Kubuntu Linux, I am unable to use Chrome for my day to day browsing. I like Firefox, but I miss the screen real estate and the speed I get from Chrome.

A couple of days ago I came across instructions for installing a pre-alpha build of Chromium on Ubuntu, and I decided to give it a try. Even though many features do not work, I was pleased with how well it did function overall. It is fast, and hasn't crashed on me yet. Granted, I haven't pressed it too hard.

Upon starting this build of Chromium, one is greeted with a somewhat unfriendly warning that this should not be used, and should not be blogged about. Since sending in bugs and blogging are not helpful, the only thing that is helpful is contributing to the project.

Being a Computer Science student, a Linux user, and a Chrome enthusiast, and a Google evangelist, I decided that I would apply to the Google Summer of Code program this year and try to work on Chromium for Linux. Although I cannot hope to singlehandedly port Chromium to Linux since it a monumental task, I would like to do my part while learning more about the technologies involved.