Kaffis Mark V wrote:
As I pointed out to a Glader in IMs the other day (Screeling?), I suspect that we won't see Chrome supporting add-ons for a long time.
What's the first add-on you go find/enable? The ad-blocker. How does Google make the bulk of its revenue? It's the largest (or one of, to hedge my bets) internet advertising distributor in the world.
The cynic in me says that Chrome was born out of a meeting where some exectutive said "why are the impressions we get from our advertising going down, month after month?" and a tech guy answering, "it might be due in large part to Firefox's growing popularity. It allows users to easily block advertising at the domain level." and then the executive snaps, "Well, I want you to stop that!" So the tech guy goes off and creates a competitor that they can control.
Errmm...actually, Chrome has extensions support enabled in the latest dev builds. Some of the earlier 4.x.x dev builds didn't have it, but I know the version I'm using right now (4.0.249.4) does. In fact, I happen to be using
Adblock+ with Chrome right now.
The only problem I've run into with it so far is that extensions are disabled in Incognito mode. Currently, this is considered "a feature, not a bug". That is, compare it to using Firefox with a privacy extension like
Distrust. Distrust offers similar functionality to Incognito mode. While distrust is enabled, things like browser history and cookie operations are recorded to a temporary location, which is then purged when you disable distrust. It also warns you about any files that you downloaded while in distrust mode. The catch is that distrust can really only monitor basic built-in Firefox functions. Because extension development is open-ended, it can't anticipate every possible way that an extension might leak private data. So if you use distrust in combination with other extensions, you privacy might not be as protected as you think it is.
At least for the time being, Chrome side-steps the issue by disabling all extensions in Incognito mode. This is effective, but it's obviously crude. In the long run, I'd like to see better integration between incognito mode and extensions. If extensions are notified of incognito mode status, then it becomes possible for them to behave accordingly. However, this still puts your privacy at the mercy of 3rd party developers who may or may not be paying attention to privacy issues. So I'm not really sure what the best solution to this is.
TL;DR -- chrome has extensions now, including AdBlock.