Take Fast Dial, for instance. [It] displays thumbnail clips of your nine favorite Web sites [and] counters thumbnail functionality found in Opera browser and Google Chrome.

[...] Open In Google Chrome is a new extension that plunks down an option in the Firefox context menu to see how the Web page looks in Chrome. In the options menu, you can also earmark certain sites you want to open exclusively in Chrome. [...] Agarwal hints that he wrote the add-on, tweaked from code for an Internet Explorer extension, for serious browsers who are weighing Chrome alongside Firefox.

InformationWeek confirms that Google Chrome will have add-ons, a move that could have an enormous impact on Chrome’s viability among the power users and early adopters in the Firefox camp. In addition to regular extensions, Chrome will also support scripts à la Greasemonkey:

“There’s two different kinds of add-ons,” [Google engineer Ojan] Vafai said. “The Firefox things extend your browser, so to speak, and then there are user scripts. We intend to do both of those in Google Chrome.” Greasemonkey’s founder, Aaron Boodman, actually works on the Google Chrome team.

Additionally, Vafai says Google will work to ensure its extensions are more stable than Firefox, where “there are problems with instability.” That statement may sound like slap in the face to Mozilla, but Chrome will likely be a boon no matter which of two browsers you prefer.

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, joining the panel along with Vafai and Microsoft Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson, said that Mozilla was looking at how Google treated tabs as a potential way to improve stability when dealing with browser add-ons. “There are good process-isolation tricks that Chrome does that we’re looking into, so we’re simply going to look at better isolation techniques for security and integrity,” he said.

The upshot: No matter which browser you choose in the end, Chrome and Firefox will push each other into innovative, fast, and hopefully more stable territories with each release.

The one thing Google Chrome was missing that kept a lot of the Firefox faithful from making the switch was the browser’s lack of add-on support. Well, that’s set to change, according to Google engineer Ojan Vafai.

Both add-ons and user scripts (á la Greasemonkey) will be supported in the near future. Currently, they’re working on ensuring that plug-ins and add-ons keep the browser as stable as it is without them, but as soon as they get that worked out, look for them to come to Chrome, probably by the time it’s out of beta. What do you think, will being able to get Adblock for Chrome motivate you to switch? Also, stop using Adblock, you jerks, ads pay my bills. [InformationWeek, image via]

The Digital Inspiration blog details the best method (at least for now) of changing Google Chrome’s User Agent String to get around browser restrictions and access unique perks, such as reading full magazines with a pretend iPhone. The hack involves opening up Chrome’s chrome.dll file with a hex editor—Amit recommends Xvi32—and searching out the User Agent String value and replacing it with whatever browser you want sites to think you’re coming from. You could do this with a portable Chrome app to create a tiny iPhone emulator, or create multiple copies of your chrome.dll to make switching back less annoying. Got another User Agent trick worth hacking for? Share it in the comments.

Windows only: Free application Google Chrome Backup makes it easy to create, back up, restore, and manage profiles with Google’s hot new web browser. If you took a ride on our power user’s guide to Google Chrome, you already know that you can create and maintain multiple user profiles with Chrome, but there’s no simple graphical user interface by default. The Google Chrome Backup utility fills that gap, and in doing so makes it simple to switch between profiles, add advanced switches to profile shortcuts, and more. Google Chrome Backup is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0. Firefox lovers, your browser was born with the tools you need to manage multiple Firefox profiles.

We love getting your feedback, and one of the themes that has cropped up in the Google Desktop Help group is that you want a lighter, faster product. We heard the message loud and clear and decided that the Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows release would be based entirely on performance.

In true Google fashion, we took a data-driven approach: Measure, then analyze, fix the most important issues and lowest hanging fruit, then rinse, lather and repeat.

First, we built performance tests that simulate a typical user’s behavior when using Google Desktop and measure the time spent on actions such as starting up, shutting down, searching, adding a gadget, adding a new document to the search index, and so forth. We then took a page from the Google Chrome playbook by running the performance tests automatically for every single change we made to the software, on dozens of machines each time so that an average of the time measurements from all of them would give us a reliable comparison against previous versions. [...]

“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems. The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application’s title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar,” explains a document about Chrome’s user experience.

This philosophical shift might explain why there are few interface distractions and the browser is barely visible. Google Chrome is built for web applications that have their own menus, keyword shortcuts and status bars. [...] ”The heck with more features, is Safari 3 faster, more stable, less memory-hungry and more compatible on the web at large? That’s what I want to see in each release,” commented Peter Kasting on an article from 2006 about Safari 3. Peter Kasting is now an engineer in the Google Chrome team.