Google Chrome for JS Plug-ins

A few months ago, the long awaited browser for Google called Chrome was released to the wild. Reviews from tech bloggers and software developers were mixed but there is a general impression that Google has somehow learned from the mistakes of the past browsers and moved ahead with a powerful browser for every Google fan to enjoy.

It is still feeling the pangs of competition but that is always accepted by most tech companies and expected because of their lack of features often found in now established browsers. There are still limitations in Google Chrome which has made them less attractive compared to other browsers.

One of the prominent limitations for Chrome is the inability to accept or integrate plug-ins for better interaction. Although this is not expected from browsers but we’re not just talking about a small start-up software company.

Google should know by now that a simple browser alone, no matter how cool their interface is will never be better if users will not have the ability to customize their experience. The client side experience especially support for highly interactive plug-ins such as JavaScript should already be available for users who wanted to test drive Chrome.

Somehow Google has heard this cry from their users and developers alike. Chrome has come out with a new version with support for Greasemonkey. It’s a simple tool but a highly efficient one especially in developing plug-ins. It doesn’t have enough library of functions for building a powerful website or software but it should have enough power to build a highly effective plug-ins for users could easily enjoy. This feature was released in build 3499 and the subsequent builds will feature additional support for Greasemonkey if any problems and bugs will be found in the development process.

But as of this writing, Greasemonkey integration for Chrome is not as well performing as developers would expect. There are certain limitations wherein it can clip the ability of the developer to be highly creative in building a plug-in.

The first limitation of Chrome’s support for Greasemonkey is the inability to fetch additional information from other sources. That means the developer could only build a plug-in wherein the entire resources and information will come from the local server.

Fetching additional information from other sources is not possible which increased the difficulty to build simple information plug-ins such as weather or the latest sports news. This might be done to improve security but we already know that plug-ins could be highly secured and even harmless as long as the sources are trusted.

The second limitation of Chrome’s support for Greasemonkey is the inability of handling Metadata. This could place a huge dent in the process of developing an efficient plug-in especially when developers wanted to build a data intensive application. Without metadata, they can’t accelerate data fetching.

Hopefully, Google would improve their support not only for Greasemonkey but for additional libraries in building a client side plug-in. Google should know by now that the ball is on their court to push the browsers to the next level.