The extension development for the Google Chrome browser is slowly taking up speed. While there is still no option to use extensions in the latest public release of the Google browser the developers are slowly improving the capabilities of the extensions manager. The latest dev builds of the web browser support extensions right out of the box without having to supply startup parameters as it was previously required. It is generally expected that extension development will really take off when the public releases of the browser start supporting extensions.

The chance is however relatively good that some developers have already created extensions for popular web services. This article will look at five Google Chrome extensions for popular Google web services including Gmail and Google Reader.

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker is a simple extension that displays a button in the Google Chrome menu bar. This button displays the number of unread email messages in the Gmail account which makes the extension useful as the user will be notified about new Gmail messages without