
Google’s own web browser, Chrome, has recently been given the ability to install extensions that can, well, extend its possibilities, making it a serious competitor to Mozilla’s Firefox, which was the number one choice for those who want to modify and customize their browser to fit their needs.
While Firefox still has its extensive collection of add-ons, the fact that a lot of them are open source gives developers the possibility to port them over for Chrome. Why would they do that? Well, a major reason is the fact that Chrome is the fastest browser available, and most people love not having to wait 30 seconds until it starts and not seeing the terrible slow down of most browsers when they open more than 30 tabs.

Firefox version 2 was good, version 3 was very good, but with 3.5, things changed. It started being a memory hog again and having troubles with performance when starting up, shutting down and having a lot of tabs and windows open. Despite the promise that it was improved, Firefox 3.6 wasn’t noticeably faster than its predecessor, and many people started turning their attention to Chrome, which just got its extensions capability.
Until Firefox 4 comes out, Chrome will likely remain the performance champion of the browser world (and even then, we don’t know for sure if Mozilla will actually come out with something faster).
As an internet marketer and/or SEO professional, the performance of your browser is crucial for your work, and slow downs and crashes are unacceptable. So, if you are one of the newcomers to Google’s Chrome, here are 5 extensions that will help you in your work and possibly replace some of your existing tools.
Firebug Lite. You may know this extension as one of the best Firefox add-ons for web page code inspection. And it finally arrived on Chrome, too. It is an almost exact copy of the Firefox version, except for a few missing features (the biggest being the lack of a Javascript debugger), which developers promise to implement in the next releases.
SEO Site Tools. This is one of the best SEO analysis extensions available. SEOMoz talked about it in great detail, and truly, it is one impressive tool to have. It uses Linkscape’s free API, and it allows you to view your social media stats, external page data, meta tags, server and domain information, and much, much more. A truly must have all-in-one tool for SEO professionals and online entrepreneurs.
Chrome SEO. Although not as powerful as the above extension, Chrome SEO is still a very good SEO tool that will show you all of the metrics you need for a site. It uses several online services and provides information about you competitors, backlinks, Page Rank, keywords and other things. If used together with some other extensions (like the ones below), it can be very useful.
Meta SEO Inspector. This extension specializes in displaying all the information you need about the META tags on a web page (including keywords, description, title, copyright, etc.). It is a quite basic SEO tool, although it can be very useful sometimes. Best used in conjunction with other SEO tools, like Chrome SEO or SEO Site Tools.

Link Grabber. This is a simple extension that will allow you to extract all the links from a web page and open them in a new tab or list. You can use it to see the number of links on a site and to copy all the links for analysis in another SEO utility (like SEO Elite, for example). Saves you a great deal of time doing that and replaces some similar utilities which you would’ve paid for.
As you can see, there are a lot of good extensions already available for Chrome, and their number will continue to grow. If before, you were holding on to Firefox because of its unique add-ons, now you have another option. Try it out!