Hacker News Reader

How hard would it be for FF add-ons to be ported onto Chrome? Is Google going to offer add-ons?

I was disappointed that it doesn't seem to offer support for user scripting a la greasemonkey. It seems like add-ons might be intentionally discouraged:

'The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. "As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you're always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken," Fisher says.'

--- http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome

That does /not/ say that add-ons are discouraged, merely that they chose to make a browser on their own because current add-ons (and backward compatibility) would restrict their power if they had chosen to revamp current browsers.

Everybody's really fond of their add-ons (I couldn't live without Tree Style Tabs), so either Google will implement them to grab more market share or hackers will add them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com