Google recently released the first public beta of their Chrome browser for Mac. While it’s speedy as heck, it lacks many basic features such as bookmark management/organization. Another popular feature the Mac version lacks is extension support. That is, until now. I spent the weekend running the latest version of Chromium, Google Chrome’s nightly beta builds. And thankfully, a clever coder at grack.com has come up with a way to re-activate the Install button on Google Chrome’s Extension site; allowing Mac users to install extensions into the latest Chromium builds.
Google Chrome for Mac now features extension support
Here’s a quick tutorial to get extensions running in Chromium:
- You must install Chromium, the widely-released Chrome beta won’t work. You can grab Chromium from the download page here. Scroll all the way to the bottom and download the latest version.
- Next, drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Enable Extension Install
- Now go to Google’s Chrome Extensions site. Click the bookmark you just created to activate the Install button on the extension pages.
- Now choose some extensions to install and click the Install button on the extension’s page.
You should now be able to install extensions into Chromium. Be aware that not all extensions will work. You’ll know if the extension is installing when you see an animation on the screen, and a dialog box appearing asking if you want to install the extension. Even then, some extensions I tried simply didn’t work. I did get a few really nice ones to work, which includes: Feedly (my favorite RSS Reader), Share-a-holic, Chrowety (a Twitter client for Chrome), DChrome Facebook, Google Reader Notifier, and iGoogle tab remover.