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The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions. That's exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today.

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We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome.

Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser's bug tracking system - it's something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect.

Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story.

Understanding the Versions of Chrome

Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down:

• Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems.

Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev, beta (Windows or Mac) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today.

Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions.

Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon

Some of Nick Baum's Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far

• Aviary - screen capture and image editing
• Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer
• Google Translate - truly, a wonder to behold
• Brizzly - an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum's former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen

Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler, for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium.

Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?)

Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well.

Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions

Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically.

Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way.

GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey

One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey. These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey.

What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman, the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team.

Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac.

Red Hot APIs On the Way

Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web.

Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try.

It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out!

Jetzt erst wird Chrome ein echter Konkurrent für Firefox. Die Extensions fühlen sich auch viel natürlicher und integrierter an als die des Firefox. Try it!

If you’ve ever wanted to place an ad on a Susan Boyle performance, the JK Wedding Dance or, more recently, the dancing doctors in pink gloves, now you can.

YouTube () has just launched a new tool that gives advertisers serious control over where their ads appear — all the way down to selecting individual videos.

In addition, the video-sharing site says that the new targeting options can suggest videos based on “keywords (like politics or fashion), viewer demographics (like age and gender), interest-based categories or some combination of the three.”

YouTube says that the features are currently beta and “intended for advertisers who work closely with sales representatives at YouTube,” but I was able to check it out by simply going to google.com/videotargeting and logging in with my Google () account.

This marks yet another step in Google’s efforts to monetize YouTube, of which there have been many in the past year. The new options seem like a great addition that will create more efficiency — and perhaps revenue — in the YouTube ecosystem.

too sick.

I like

Until now, there’s been a lot of chatter about Put.io in the Turkish tech scene – but no-one had seen it. Today they’ve let us in to have a look at the service.

So imagine a service that downloads files from Rapidshare for you, then saves them on your 50GB Put.io account. Or forget about Rapidshare, maybe it collects files from Bittorrent automatically. Here’s an another example. Put.io lets you watch a DivX video online, without downloading it to your computer, in high quality, and listen to your music files inside your browser.

Put.io will be launched as a paid service. The service is in private beta right now, but they soon plan to accept beta users.

And what if I told you that the service will automatically follow RSS feeds that you give it and save the torrents, MP3 and AVI files included in those feeds automatically? The service works totally on the server side, so its download performance is higher than home connections. Put.io downloads 700 MB files in a few minutes and lets you watch them online.

We tried this. So for instance you can paste a link like this into the servie and store the file

http://rapidshare.com/files/140596948/HD.Wallpaper.Huge.Pack-iAPULA.Tahir.part01.rar

A divx fetch test:
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.avi/bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/revision3/web/diggnation/0224/diggnation–0224–darkside–large.xvid.avi

A torrent:
http://www.legaltorrents.com/get/91-elephants-dream-1024.torrent

Or some RSS feeds:

http://www.legaltorrents.com/feeds/cat/music.rss
http://revision3.com/diggnation/feed/Xvid-Large

You can reach your files on put.io via iPhone, iPod Touch, all kinds of smart phones, PSP and PlayStation 3, and even convert video files into MP4 format automatically and watch them with your iPhone if you like.

It’s also social in that it lets you share your files on put.io.

As far as I know the closest other product would be Wuala. But, they’ll probably be competing with box.net, BitTorrent and even P2P clients.

Fantastsich --> Betas gibts hier http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/12/04/we-have-invites-for-the-put-io-cloud-storage-game-changer

nur wohin dann mit den Druckerpressen?!

Just over a month ago, Facebook rolled out a new homepage redesign. Now it looks like the social network isn’t completely satisfied with the results, as it’s now testing yet another homepage redesign.

We don’t know when the new design will launch yet, but we have analyzed several screenshots of the new Facebook () that were sent to us. While most of the changes are minor, there are a few that really stand out and reveal Facebook’s strategy and future direction.

Here are our top five observations about the upcoming Facebook homepage redesign, along with screenshots:

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Changes to Facebook’s Redesign

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1. All of the notifications have been moved to the top left. Notifications, requests, and inbox are prominently displayed next to the Facebook logo. Chat remains on the bottom, however.

2. Search is far more important in this redesign. As my fellow usability experts can attest, placing the search box in the middle of the page instead of the right hand side increases the number of searches users make. Facebook wants to focus on its real-time search engine as it prepares to compete with Twitter.

3. Your profile picture and status appears on the homepage. If you look on the current homepage design, you’ll find the updates of all of your friends, but yours isn’t constantly there, reminding you to update your old, outdated status.

This is a problem Facebook has needed to fix for a while. Now it’s addressed with a new section at the top left of the homepage with your face and your most recent status update, along with a prompt to update your status.

4. There’s a new border around the main content. It separates your left-hand navigation and notifications from your Facebook news feed.

5. The ability to see your inbox from the homepage. We want to stress how important this change is to the new Facebook design. It gives you direct access to your most recent messages without leaving the homepage, which should increase engagement.

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Facebook’s Goals

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Facebook hasn’t changed all that much with the design. To us, it’s more like a tweak to help improve engagement numbers that have probably been lagging.

The reemphasis seems to surround search, the inbox, responding to notifications, and status updates. Moving the search box is a very smart move as the company looks to make search a core experience, like it is currently with Twitter ().

Being able to view the inbox from the homepage should also spur more messages. Finally, prompting users to update their status, something present in older iterations of the Facebook homepage, will likely increase the amount of content users generate.

We’re going to investigate this design and find out when it launches. In the meantime, let us know what you think of the new Facebook in the comments.

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