On the Edge!

Bookmark sync has been an advanced web user feature for a very long time now. It started probably with Firefox’s Xmarks. To briefly sum it up for those who didn’t know about bookmark sync, its a way of sharing the same set of bookmarks across various computers. This might not seem that important for a newbie, but for those advanced geeks, its pretty much something which they cant live without. The good news is that the chrome team has officially implemented bookmark sync on the dev channel. Getting it to work is all the more easier than getting extensions to work on chrome.  Just grab a copy of the latest chrome from the dev channel and launch it with “–enable-sync” command-line flag.

If you are interested to explore using the extensions on chrome, check out my post on enabling and using extensions from here.

That’s a cool feature to have on your browser, but what i am waiting for is a sync like Weave for firefox. What other features would you wish for on chrome?

On 8th July  Google announced officially on its blog that a chrome OS is under development and will be available in the market from mid next year, though you can still get the source code’s starting this year end. The news is all over the blogosphere and twitter. Well few days back, Google silently launched the 3.0 version of the chrome browser on the chrome dev. channel. This did not have the hype as what Chrome Os has even before its release has, but it didn’t miss my attention as well.

So what’s hot in this 3.0 version of the release?  The latest builds support extensions, has a customizable new tab page and a lot of other bug fixes under the hood. Extensions is really an awesome feature that everybody has been longing for on Chrome. I have posted some screenshots of the latest build with some extensions, so that you could have a sneak preview.

The New tab page, with the customizable UI, to pin your most visited websites in the thumbnail view. Still waiting for that tips & suggestions to populate.

A screen shot of the new tab page in list view.

  My installed extensions (chritter and gmail checker)are visible on the status bar( they call it the tool strip)

My chrome extension screen shows the extensions that i am using currently. (Don’t be scared by the error, its just that i deleted something i was trying)

Now that you have an idea as to what it looks like, try it out your self. It would be unfair if I wouldn’t post links to the site where i got to read through and try the extensions. So here they go..

Firstly head over to the HOW TO page. Once you are done the  the basics you can try these suggested extension samples from here. Do make sure you have the latest build from here or you are on the dev channel subscribing to the latest builds.

The extensions that i use on chrome are listed below. I have linked the original  site incase you wanna try

1. Adsweep – removes adds. This one gets a 5 star from me.
2. Cleeki  an interesting and a MUST try extension its very much like IE 8 Accelerators, in fact you can use all the IE 8 accelerators with chrome from here.
3. Chritter – the twitter extension that shows the last tweet of all the folks you are following.
4. Gmail Checker- displays unread mail count.
5. Rss subscription- finally you can see the feed icon on the URL bar.

If you are interested in Google page rank you can try this extension here.

Well there’s lot more to be done on the extensions development and their periodic updates etc, so far I am enjoying all the extensions i tried. Incase you know something i haven’t tried, do let me know i would be excited to try them.

Chrome hasn’t dropped me, and am already getting addicted to chrome. With such rapid development on chrome, Firefox has a lot of challenges coming ahead.  Well that’s really healthy for the web..What do you think?