GOOGLE'S CHROME BROWSER HITS 10,000 EXTENSIONS

Yesterday, Google put up a post on the Chromium Blog to celebrate a year of extensions being available for their Chrome web browser. The main part of the post touts some big numbers that the feature has accumulated in the past 12 months. Those include, over 8,500 extensions, 1,500 themes, a third of Chrome users now having at least one extension installed, and over 70 million extension and theme installs total. But actually, looking at the Extension Gallery, the numbers may be even bigger.

According to the pages in the Extensions Gallery, there are actually now over 10,000 extensions in the gallery. 10,078, to be exact. The “Most Popular“, “Most Recent“, and the “Top Rated” areas point to that number. Each area shows what would appear to be accurate counts for the total number of extensions currently in the Gallery.

It’s not clear why Google wouldn’t tout the 10,000 number instead of the “over 8,500″ while marking their one-year milestone. But unless their Gallery counts are off, the number is into five digits now, just a year after launch. (It is worth noting that the Chrome Web Store does count just over 8,500 extensions. Presumably, the Chrome Web Store will eventually be the official home of extensions, but the standalone area does still exist with its higher count.)

And the number is also significant because Chrome’s chief rival when it comes to extensions (aka add-ons) is, of course, Firefox. So how many add-ons are available on that browser? Mozilla isn’t quite as transparent with the counts (instead, not surprisingly, they focus on cumulative download numbers), but presumably if you add up the totals from all the categories, you’ll get the overall total. As it stands today, that number is 12,739. [TechCrunch]