Google has just launched Extensions for the Chrome browser. It will be interesting to watch whether their approach to add-ons differs from ours, and in what ways.
The vibrant community of Firefox add-on developers has long been one of our greatest strengths, so Google’s addition of this feature is something of a challenge. I for one welcome the increased competition. It’s going to make us at Mozilla work harder to stay ahead, but the end result can only be good for users — more choices and higher quality software.
The Chrome extensions apparently don’t work on Mac yet, which is too bad; the Google Translate extension looks pretty useful.
Not The User's Fault 
December 8, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Hi Jono,
While I’m not on the extensions subteam, I can tell you a few ways that our approach differs from Gecko’s.
First, we expose a limited surface area to extensions in the form of a set of well-defined APIs. As a consequence, we can avoid marking all extensions as broken when we update, and we can make it less likely that people will write extensions that really hose the user, but our extensions don’t have the power and flexibility that Firefox ones do.
Second, we run extensions in their own process, and apply similar security measures as we do for other parts of Chrome. We’ve also thought carefully about what channels to open between extensions and web content, in order to make things like extension-introduced XSS holes less likely. This is a reason why user scripts in Chrome do not do everything that Greasemonkey scripts can do.
Third, our approach to hosting extensions is to host first and review later, except in a few specific cases. Our hope is that full review beforehand will be unnecessary. My understanding is that the review queue in the Mozilla addons gallery is a bit lengthy at the moment.
HTH!
December 8, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Thanks a lot for your comment, Peter. That’s really informative.
December 9, 2009 at 12:16 am
Hey Peter,
The Chrome extension model sounds similar to the JetPack API that’s being developed by labs. I know it’s been talked about making each JetPack run its own process as well (not sure where that discussion went though).
As for nomination wait time, 94% of updates to already public add-ons are reviewed within three weeks, and 50% of updates to already public add-ons are reviewed within one week. New add-ons take a bit longer (they require a more extensive review). 66% of new add-ons nominated for public status are reviewed within four weeks, and 51% of those are reviewed within two weeks.
December 9, 2009 at 2:00 am
Hi Shawn,
There are definitely lots of similarities between Chrome extensions and jetpacks. I no longer recall the precise timeline, but around the time that both models became more public, several of the Chromium extension devs and Mike Beltzner all said that it would be nice to someday converge on some kind of model that could be used on all browsers, and in the meantime for each to watch the other. I think the core idea of “web technology plus a defined API surface” is appealing in a number of ways and thus it’s just sensible that multiple different groups are looking at it.
As for review times, thanks for the detail. It is interesting to me, although I was mostly trying to emphasize the philosophical difference between review and non-review. I am not personally familiar enough with either extension system to make comments on whether one of these is “better” in some sense, or whether Chrome extensions would need more review if we added more API surface later.
Best wishes!
December 9, 2009 at 6:07 am
I certainly feel that Chrome extensions are a hit.. it’s amazing on how many many new addons are added in just few hours.
I am using all the google chrome extensions right now and testing the best ones.. I love firefox but it will be interesting to see the Chrome team approach.. 🙂
December 10, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Umm, am just a dumb end user. Chrome is really tempting me now.. I stuck with FF while all my friends switched over to chrome solely because i’m addicted to addons and the Manifesto.
FF was the first software company that i discovered had an ideology, and it’s kinda exotic, because i always believed software companies were soulless.
I do hate the startup time and the crashes and as chrome has brought in the extensions, the case for me staying with FF is getting weaker.
However, Google is being evil sometimes, and the FF ideology charms me, and it could be the reason i’m typing this through FF, which is why i hope the bigwigs of FF are and will remain sincere about the ideology.
Hope you guys remain competitive, I do want you to win but just don’t become obsolete.
December 11, 2009 at 1:58 am
Hi Rasmussen. Thanks for your feedback. I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel the way you do.
I started writing a long response, but then figured it will make more sense as a new blog post.
December 11, 2009 at 2:39 am
[…] | Tags: firefox, google chrome, open source development, performance | Leave a Comment On one of my previous posts, commenter Rasmussen wrote: Umm, am just a dumb end user. Chrome is really tempting me now.. I […]
December 20, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Right now, the thing that’s really keeping me on Firefox is the Ubiquity extension. As a writer, I can’t imagine doing without its many time saving functions…
In fact, Ubiquity has come to replace a lot of add ons for me.
I would like to move to chrome because of the minimalistic design which gives maximum space for the screen – no title bar, no status bar. I can do this in Firefox too, but with Add-ons which I’m afraid will slow down my system.
Chrome is also faster – certain CSS heavy sites have much better performance in Chrome than Firefox for Ubuntu which has poor performance with Rich text boxes in sites like Facebook and wordpress.
I’m looking forward to future iterations of Firefox that give more emphasis to screen space and speedy scrolling.
March 15, 2010 at 11:40 am
Google Chrome the best browser
Thank you
September 23, 2010 at 12:40 pm
صفر واحد,
Different strokes for different folks. Troll harder.