Google Chrome ^[1] is quickly gaining market share in the browser wars, however one feature missing in Google Chrome is the ability to extend the browser and add third party extensions to it.

Many people have speculated that Chrome will be getting extension support as early as May 2009, turns out that they may very well be on path to achieving this deadline, with the spotting of a chrome extension in the wild.

The Google Operating System blog reports a design document ^[2] that shows and example of Google Chrome extension.

The extension is question is pretty simple, and it just replaces the Google Logo on http://www.google.com with a lolcat image.

To test out the extension, you will need to load Google Chrome with additional parameters, to do that, right click on the chrome shortcut and click on properties, navigate to the shortcut tab and append the following to the existing text in the target text box.

–enable-extensions load-extension=d:chromeextensions

The file path could be any folder where you want to store the chrome extensions. Download the existing extension ^[3] and extract the content to the folder which you specified would hold Chrome extensions, in this example d:chromeextensions

After extracting the file, open Google Chrome and navigate to http://www.google.com, you should see a lolcat image instead of the regular Google logo.

You can change the image to anything you want by editing the foo.js file in the extension folder.

Looking deeper into how the extensions for Google Chrome work, I found two major files which were part of the extension, one called foo.js and another called manifest.json. The manifest.json file contained the actual extension for chrome, whereas foo.js contained the properties for the extension.

You can also view all the installed extension in Google Chrome by typing chrome-ui://extensions in the browser address bar.

This is definitely great news, and we can really expect extensions to make a debut publicly pretty soon. What are you thoughts about the Chrome extensions? Are you excited to start using it? Let us know through your comments.

You will need to subscribe to the development channel of Google Chrome to test Chrome extensions, check out a step by step guide on How To Get Latest Development Versions Of Google Chrome ^[4].

First Google Chrome Extensions ^[5] [Google Operating System]