A while ago, I wrote several posts about my favorite add-ons in Firefox, sharing the little (and big) tools that made browsing faster, safer, and easier. At that time, Firefox was the only browser that had anything like add-ons, but that has changed since now Google Chrome and Apple Safari have opened up to third-party extensions in their most recent versions. It’s been amazing how quickly new extensions for Chrome have been created since Google opened up the platform. I have moved to Chrome as my primary browser, primarily because I was finding it faster in day to day use than Firefox, but largely because I was able to find Chrome substitutes for almost all of my most used Firefox add-ons. Since Chrome extensions are relatively new, and many people are discovering the functionalities that they can add to the browser for the first time, it seems like the ideal moment to look at some of the best extensions for Chrome:

Oldies but Goodies

Some of the most important Firefox add-ons now have nearly identical Google Chrome versions. When I say “important”, I mean the add-ons that will make web browsing safer, more secure, and faster.

I wrote about AdBlock and Web of Trust in this post on Firefox add-ons, and both have Chrome versions. Web of Trust warns you when you navigate to a dangerous, risky, or deceitful webpage, and lets you vet links before you click on them. AdBlock eliminates most adds on pages across the web, which makes surfing faster (since the browser does not have to load the adds) and safer (since adds on some pages may contain malicious code).

Other Firefox add-ons that I have written about with Chrome siblings are Google Search Preview, which shows you thumbnail images of the pages in Google search results, and Speed Dial, which allows you to create easily-clickable page thumbnails when you open a new tab.

For Gmail Users

Google Chrome has some great extensions that make dealing with Gmail a whole lot easier. By far, my favorite is an extension called Google Mail Checker Plus. Mail checker plus essentially integrates Gmail into the browser — it displays the number of unread messages, makes an alert noise when a new email comes in, and allows you to preview the message and choose to delete, archive, or read it wherever you happen to be in the browser. This allows Chrome to work more like a proper email program, notifying you of new messages and allowing you to easily triage your inbox without having to jump into a Gmail window every time. Google Mail Checker Plus easily beats out any Gmail add-on I have seen for Firefox, as well as Google’s official extension (called Google Mail Checker) which does not allow you to preview messages without going into Gmail.

Another nice extension for dealing with Gmail is Better Gmail, which allows you to customize the Gmail interface to your liking, and adds little niceties to the experience, like highlighting a row when you mouse over it. There are tons of little tweaks you can make to change Gmail, and it takes playing around with the settings a bit to discover what you want. There is also a Firefox version of this extension which behaves almost identically.

For Facebook Users

There is a very useful extension called Facebook Photo Zoom, which automatically shows you an image in full size on Facebook when you mouse over it. This doesn’t sound like it would make that big of a difference, but it allows you to quickly see that image of your friends in your feed (or wherever it happens to be) without forcing you to click through to another page or photo gallery, and this quickly becomes something you start to take for granted. It is possible to toggle this on and off right in the browser, which is important for times it might get in the way, such as when you are looking a gallery or uploading photos.

Reference Tools

Wikipedia Companion allows you to look something up on Wikipedia in a convenient pop-up window, so that you can look something up without leaving the page you’re on. The extension makes searching Wikipedia a one-click affair, which is perfect if you just want to quickly access a piece of information.

Google Dictionary, an official extension by Google, allows you to quickly lookup any word you find online without leaving the site you are on by either highlighting the word or typing it into a pop-up search box.

For Android Users

If you have a phone running version 2.2 or later of Google’s Android, you’re going to want to look at an extension called Chrome to Phone, created by a Google engineer during his “20% time”. The extension allows you to take pages, maps, or links and send them to your phone, so that you can view them on the go. There is a corresponding (free) Android application that needs to be downloaded to the phone for this to work. I haven’t used this myself, since I’m currently using an iPhone, but it reportedly works well and is very useful, not to mention cool.

Related Posts:

• My Favorite Firefox Addons, Part 1
• My Favorite Firefox Addons, Part 2
• iPhone OS 4.0 (iOS 4) — Run Though, Impressions, and Tips

Here’s a challenge:  could I compare the four major browsers without spilling more than 125 words on each? And somehow reference Lolcats? I recently did just that for Concrete, the student newspaper at the University of East Anglia. Here’s the article, in it’s entirety:

Web Browser Faceoff!

by Tyler Kearn

Microsoft Internet Explorer:

Compared to the other web browsers listed here, Internet Explorer is the slowest, the buggiest, and the most susceptible to viruses, hackers and spyware. Also, everybody uses it. It is far and away the most popular browser because it included in every version of Windows. Internet Explorer isn’t bad. Website designers know that the vast majority of people use IE, so pretty much every website out there works with it. Plus, there are some pages or web apps that only work in IE. It’s just that it’s hard to be nice to IE when other browsers that are safer, offer more features, load faster, and do not crash just as I find the funniest Lolcats pic ever.

Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox has seen a large rise in users recently, and for good reason—it is the safest and most extensible browser out there. Firefox is open source, meaning that programmers collaborated on the code, and that bugs and security problems tend to get patched much more quickly. Firefox is free, and available for any operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux). One of the biggest advantages of Firefox is the huge library of “add ons” that is available for the program. These are little extensions that contribute functionality like letting you control iTunes from inside the browser, giving you a preview of web pages from a Google search, or letting you skin the browser with leopard print. Firefox is pretty fast, very stable, and very competitive.

Apple Safari:

Safari is the web browser that comes with the Mac operating system, but is also available for Windows as a free download. Safari’s renders web pages very quickly—Apple says 2x faster than IE—and it renders them in that aesthetically pleasing Apple way. The browser is supposed to look like etched metal, and it smoothes over fonts in a way which makes them inaccurate but pretty. As per all things Apple, there is not much about Safari that can be customized or added if you want more features or you don’t like the Apple look. Far worse, Safari has had a good share of security issues, and Apple won’t talk about them until they fix them. For this reason alone, it might be best to consider one of the other browsers.

Google Chrome:

Chrome, the newcomer to the scene, is an open source browser from Google. Right now it is for Windows only, but Google says that will change. It’s arguably the fastest browser on this list, and it has mechanisms to help prevent crashes. Chrome is based on the same underlying architecture as Safari, but Google rewrote the JavaScript engine to be faster as well. JavaScript is the web language behind things like, say, Google Mail and Google Docs, making Chrome the best browser for dealing with those kinds of web applications. Chrome is minimalist to the extreme—it’s just a web window with no frills and hardly any menu options. Until it gains more features, many might want to look elsewhere for a primary browser, but it shows a lot of promise.

Summary:

There are tons of issues that I didn’t even touch on in this summary. People have written thousands of words comparing each little detail of these browsers against each other. Ultimately though, the three most important attributes of any web browser are always going to be speed, stability, and security.

Internet Explorer comes in last on all three counts. The rest of it isn’t as clear cut. Firefox is easily the safest browser, which for me puts it on top, but it is a little slower than Safari and Chrome. Safari is fast but lags a little in security, and Chrome is faster still in some circumstances, but it’s still very new and needs to be fleshed out.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla are all busy at work on the next version of their web browsers. Betas of Internet Explorer 8 (which supposedly helps with speed and rendering accuracy, among other things) and Firefox 3.1 (which is supposed to have a JavaScript engine to rival Chrome’s) can both already be found online. Any of these releases could potentially change the game.