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Filed under: Google, Open Source, Browsers

Embed a (very) basic Twitter client in Google Chrome with the ChromedBird extension

Hot on the heels of my roundup of 15+ great extensions for Google Chrome, I've already found some more that deserve to be mentioned. First on the list: ChromedBird.

You probably guessed from the name, but yes, it's a minimal Twitter client which you can access from Chrome's main toolbar. It hides inside a little birdie button until you want to check your stream or post an update.

ChromedBird displays the last 5 tweets in your stream and allows you to post updates - and that's it. Links you paste into your updates are automatically shortened using bit.ly. Sure, it's a pretty stripped-down Twitter experience, but it's still nice to have close at hand when browsing with Chrome.

ChromeBird is a little buggy, but it's a very early build. I'll turn a blind eye, since we only get extension support in somewhat buggy dev builds (click here to download) of Chrome (or Chromium) right now anyway.

You can find the ChromedBird .crx over at ChromeExtensions.

Filed under: Google, Open Source, Beta, Browsers

Extensions now enabled by default in Google Chrome dev channel, now where are they?


Did Google just take the next step in making extensions play a more interesting role in Google Chrome? Possibly, but at least now we can trim our command line switches down a little.
Those of you running Chrome's bleeding-edge developer channel builds can now drop the --enable-extensions switch. They're now supported by default.

Of course, that assumes you've bothered to enable them in the first place. After using Chrome almost exclusively for about a month, I found that I had amassed a nice collection of Userscripts and bookmarklets but had yet to find a truly interesting extension. XMarks is getting close, and the LastPass team is also hard at work.

New updates to the developer documents have also been published, so perhaps that will help things take off.

At any rate, it's the "first step in [the] launch process," according to Chromium developer Aaron Boodman. Next stop: the beta channel.

Aaron's blog post also indicates that the UI may change by the time the jump to beta happens. That'd be nice, because the puffy, light-blue bar at the bottom of the browser window? It's not going to win any UI beauty contests.

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