Google Chrome to get support for add-ons

Google's new Web browser eventually will support add-ons and user scripts à la Firefox Add-ons and Greasemonkey, Google engineer Ojan Vafai said during a panel discussion on the future of Web browsers at Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Friday.

"There's two different kinds of add-ons," Vafai said. "The Firefox things extend your browser, so to speak, and then there are user scripts. We intend to do both of those in Google Chrome." Greasemonkey's founder, Aaron Boodman, actually works on the Google Chrome team.

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 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.

Vafai cautioned that Google will work hard to make sure its add-on paradigm keeps Chrome stable. "We hope to do them right," he said. "As many people notice in Firefox add-ones, there are problems with instability."