Bijan Sabet

Developing Chrome Extensions

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser since the day it was released. I have firefox purely as a backup for the extensions that I count on.

But more of those extensions are coming to Chrome everyday and new ones are actually coming out on Chrome first.

One of my favorite Chrome exensions is Dan Kantour’s Extension.fm. I’ve been playing around with it all afternoon. Note that Extension.fm came out on Chrome first.

For those of you that don’t know, Dan is the creator of Streampad which is a music player that sits on the bottom of my blog. Using Streampad you can easily playback all of the songs that are on bijansabet.com as well as bijan.fm

Anyway, back to Extension.fm. Extension.fm does a few things and does them very well. Once you add the extension to Chrome it will provide an easy mp3 player for all the tracks it finds on a web page. Here’s a screen grab of what it looks like. It also supports last.fm’s audio scrobbler. It’s fantastic to use along with the Tumblr Dashboard.

I was emailing with Dan today and asked him about his experience developing for Chrome vs Firefox. Dan told me that Chrome is easier and better in every way. It’s all html/css/javascript and straightforward with built in tools. And Chrome checks every 30 minutes for updated extensions. Push it to the server and thats it. No restart after the update.

As a user, easy install and no restart are big things. It’s amazing how the Blackberry almost always asks to restart after app installs. Chrome and iPhone don’t.

According to Google Analytics, 22% of the visitors to my blog are using Chrome. It will be interesting to see what that number looks like 6months from now — especially if more developers agree with Dan.