Extensions are coming to Google Chrome in the near future. The current developer build supports them, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the implementation -, you don’t have to restart the browser to use an extension you’ve just installed like you do in Firefox, for example.

On the other hand, the group of brave folks using the developer build don’t have nearly as many extensions to pick from yet. Firefox has the best lineup in the browser biz, so let’s play a wishing game; here are some Firefox extensions we’d love to see pop up in Chrome’s gallery, too. Some of our favorites are already in the works, but we haven’t yet heard a peep about any of the ones on this list.

If you’ve already thought of at least one plugin without which you just can’t make the switch from Firefox to Chrome, feel free to add to our list in the comments.

1. Tree Style Tabs

The proponents of Tree Style Tabs are not the majority, but they make two excellent points. Their extension of choice sorts tabs vertically along the left side of the website you’re viewing instead of at the top of the browser. This makes more efficient use of screen real estate on widescreen displays – which means most displays nowadays.

Even more notably, Tree Style Tabs displays your tabs in a tree (Surprise!), with each tab appearing one level beneath the tab from which you opened it. If you have 50 tabs going, that visual certainly makes them easier to manage.

2. IE Tab

There are some web applications that still only work properly and with all features intact in Internet Explorer – Microsoft Sharepoint, for example. Firefox’s IE Tab extension opens a native IE tab within the Firefox interface. It looks like any other Firefox tab for the most part, but under the hood it’s all IE. This feature is supported in the spinoff browser ChromePlus, but the original still lacks it. The extension is also great for developers who want to test sites cross browser without actually having to open two separate browsers.

Hey, while you’re at it, can we have a Firefox Tab too?

3. TwitterBar

It’s neat that Chrome will do Google searches from its address bar, but with Firefox’s TwitterBar you can type and send tweets there too. Jumping over to TweetDeck or your Twitter.com tab would use up two or three more clicks or key presses. You’ll hear no complaints here if you accidentally tweet “http://www.mashable.com” but be warned that it’s a possibility with this extension installed.

4. ScribeFire

You can use ScribeFire to write blog posts and publish them to WordPress, Movable Type, and a number of other platforms without browsing away from the site you’re blogging about. It pops up at the bottom of your Firefox window, and you can drag items from the site in front of you to the body of your post.

Chrome’s speed and stability make it attractive to bloggers, so ScribeFire or something like it would be right at home.

5. StumbleUpon

Delicious was among the first extensions to make its way to Chrome, and we like it, but we’re still hoping for an easy StumbleUpon solution to add to our social bookmarking options. Admittedly, there is a functional web-based workaround out there for Chrome, but it demands some URL tweaking, so it doesn’t match the Firefox extension’s ease of use by a longshot. That’s why we want a legit Chrome extension.

6. FaviconizeTab

This extension adds an option to reduce tabs to the size of a favicon (the tiny website icons seen in the address bar), removing the accompanying title text. It’s useful in the eternal battle to keep as many tabs visible as possible. You probably don’t need all that text; for example, Twitter and Facebook tabs should be recognizable by their iconic (pun only sort of intended) lower-case “t” and “f” logos, respectively. Chrome’s tabs are already more conservative with pixels than Firefox’s tabs are, but every little bit helps.

7. AutoCopy

AutoCopy sends text to the clipboard as soon as you select it, no keyboard shortcut necessary. You’ll never need to hit Control or Command + C to copy text, and if you have an application like CopyPaste Pro you can recover any clipboard items you might accidentally replace.

Many Linux distributions with out-of-the-now-proverbial-box clipboard history functionality ditched Control + C ages ago, and so have many Firefox users thanks to this extension. Chrome should be next.

8. LeechBlock

Never let it be said that Chrome users are not as productive as Firefox users. LeechBlock helps you manage your time with up to six groups of websites by blocking them when you know you shouldn’t be visiting them. You can limit your time with each group to specific hours of the day – like only being able to visit Facebook after you clock out of work at 5:00 PM – or you can tell the plugin to only let you access certain sites for so many minutes out of each hour.

9. Taboo

The self-described cure for “tabitis,” Taboo adds a button to save tabs for later (scrollbar location, form data, and all) instead of leaving them open to eat up memory and clutter the top of your browser. It also takes a snapshot of each saved tab so you can browse thumbnails when you’re ready to revisit the stuff you didn’t have the time to finish before. The usefulness of this extension is platform-agnostic, so the extension should be too. Let’s hope we see a Chrome clone soon.

10. Stylish

Google has run ads promoting Chrome’s many aesthetic themes, but with Stylish you can re-theme not just your browser but each website you visit.

It’s similar in principle to Greasemonkey; you download geek-made tweaks to the CSS of existing websites, and the plugin interprets those tweaks a
nd displays the sites differently as a result. We’ve already pointed out some of the best examples of what this extension can do for Firefox users, and we’d love to see it on Chrome in the near future.

What other Firefox extensions would you love to see on Chrome? Let us know in the comments.

Google has been actively collecting feedback on Google Wave with an ongoing survey, which was distributed via email, the help center, and Twitter. Today they’ve published the initial findings for public dissection.

So far results indicate that users love the concept of Wave, appreciate the collobartion features, and like the extensions, gadgets, and robots. On the flip side, however, the most perplexing part of the Wave experience is that users’ friends and contacts don’t have access to Wave. Respondents also complained of speed issues and indicated a desire for integration with more tools like email.

Based on our experience with Google Wave, the results that Google has published are spot on and point to some of the reasons why the system is both a game changer and, on the other hand, still not ready for mainstream attention.

Google does say that they will be acting on your feedback and opinions:

“With these responses and other data, we’re organizing our team around the core issues that are important to making waving better. We’re working hard to scale our systems so you can invite your friends and colleagues to wave with you. We’re also thinking about how to integrate with existing communication and collaboration tools. And since we all know that fast is better than slow, a large portion of the team is working to make Google Wave faster.”

Do your Google Wave likes and dislikes fall in line with survey data? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image from watch4u on Flickr

In time for Black Friday, Microsoft and eBay are partnering to offer eBay Daily Deals to Internet Explorer 8 users directly from the browser. Via a Internet Explorer Web Slice, Microsoft will offer users the best “Daily Deals” from eBay from within the browser.

The deals will be found within Favorites Bar on IE8, and will be updated daily within the browser. In conjunction with the new feature, eBay will also launch a “12 Days of Deals” promotion that will feature a deal of the day within the browser starting tomorrow. The search feature will also let you search eBay from IE8 and will show suggest popular products on eBay to users. And you can find and preview eBay items from any site you are on without leaving the page. eBay previously launched a browser highlighter for IE last year.

In time for the holiday online shopping season, Microsoft is also touting IE8’s malware and phishing protections. And the browser’s InPrivate Browsing feature lets people control what the browser saves in terms of cookies, history files and data.

The Microsoft and eBay partnership is odd but eBay is pushing hard this year to get a piece of the holiday shopping market. The e-commerce giant recently launched a new iPhone application dubbed Deals and upgraded its shopping app for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform and debuted an enhanced mobile website.

Black Friday is upon us and retailers online and off have brought out the big guns for the busiest shopping day of the year. While most of the doorbusters are long gone, you can still catch some terrific bargains online.

We scoured ads, online deal sites, and our Twitter accounts (hey, if we have to work today, we’re going to try to shop at the same time) and found five can’t miss deals.

Amazon.com $150 off MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops – Edited to add: Amazon.com has sold out of the regular MacBooks (other retailers offer them through Amazon but not at a discount) so the $150 off only applies to the MacBook Pro models at this time. Lots of sites have Apple stuff on sale today – even the Apple Store – but only Amazon offers free shipping, no tax (unless you live in Washington), and an instant $150 off either the 13? MacBook ($849 today only), the 13? MacBook Pro ($1049 today only) and the 15? MacBook Pro ($1549 today only). If you are looking at getting a portable Apple laptop, think about doing it today.

1 TB LaCie External hard drive – BH Photo Video has the fashionable and spacious Lacie external hard drive for $90. It’s one of the best prices you can find on a 1 TB external drive right now.

$30 Canon Multifunction Printer – Office Depot has the Canon PIXMA MP490 for just $30 after a $70 instant savings. The price is good through tomorrow. Print photos, make copies and scan documents.

Sony HDTV and Blu-ray Combo – BH Photo Video has a Sony 42? LCD HDTV (120hz) and a Sony Blu-ray Live enabled Blu-ray player paired together for just $804. If you’re looking at upgrading your home theater this season, this is a great package.

$529 Toshiba 40? HDTV” - Tiger Direct is selling a 40? Toshiba 1080p HDTV for $529 plus shipping. It’s a great deal for this particular set and Tiger Direct is donating at least $100,000 to the Susan G. Korman Foundation this weekend.

What are the best deals you’ve managed to find? Share them in the comments!

The story of Michaele and Tareq Salahi should serve as a lesson in the wrong way to seek fame. The couple, which is being considered by Bravo for the DC version of The Real Housewives series, somehow managed to make it past a security checkpoint to attend the White House state dinner on Tuesday evening, where they proceeded to party with the political elite.

It also just so happens that Michaele Salahi has a public Facebook Page, which she used to post a smattering of photos from the evening, including one of her and her husband with Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s not all glitz and glamor for the limelight seeking couple. According to an update from CBS, the couple may soon face a rude awakening as the Secret Service’s active investigation into the matter could result in criminal chargers.

According to CBS, “Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin says the agency is moving closer to beginning a criminal investigation. He says that’s one reason the Secret Service hasn’t yet explained what happened when Michaele and Tareq Salahi arrived at the security checkpoint Tuesday for the dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.”

Interestingly enough, as the investigation unfolds, those widely shared Facebook photos from Salahi’s page could prove to be the couple’s worst nightmare, especially should criminal charges be filed.

With such strong competition from Mozilla and Microsoft, the only thing Opera can do to stay competitive is to innovate. And one has to hand it to them: although it doesn’t have a huge user base in the desktop web browser space, Opera is always one step ahead of the rest, for better or for worse.

With version 10.10, Opera has taken its biggest step into the unknown so far, marrying the web browser with the web server. It definitely makes it unique in the world of web browsers, but there’s always the lingering question whether all these new features are really something we need, or is it just confusing the users?

With Opera Unite integrated into the browser, the web becomes a read/write affair. You can share photos (10 GB of them), stream music, serve a chat or even an entire web site directly from your browser. At Opera, they have high hopes for the technology. From the official site:

“Our devices will evolve. From in-dash computers in trucks to entertainment systems in airplanes, and from a netbook in North Dakota to a phone in North Africa, every device is both a consumer and a provider of content.”

The idea is certainly interesting, but the web has been moving in another direction in the past couple of years: the cloud. Instead of having stuff run on your computer, your applications and your data reside in the cloud, with all the resources and the know-how provided by a company like Google. So yes, with Opera Unite, you can host a web site on your own home computer, but you might run into bandwidth issues; with Google Sites, you can easily create a web site without worrying about bandwidth, but you’re at Google’s mercy, so to say. So far, despite possible privacy and security issues, cloud computing has been taking over, and it’s hard to imagine Opera turning the tide in the other direction. Some Unite applications, however, like the media server or the chat, are quite useful and might win over some converts for the Norwegian browser.

Other interesting features in the new Opera 10.10 include Opera’s Turbo technology, which speeds up browsing by compressing web pages on Opera’s servers and delivering you the “lite” version, Opera Link, which lets you synchronize data across several computers, a slick new look with a resizable tab bar, and a BitTorrent-enabled download manager. See the full list of features here.

Woot, the popular bargain site that offers one good (sometimes great) deal a day, has just launched a new portal at deals.Woot. The new site is a fairly major departure for Woot, which up until now has been driven by product selections from a team of Woot employees (aside from the main Woot.com site, which is often tech/geek focused, there are special subsites for shirts, wine, and a handful of others). Unlike these sites, Deals.Woot is run by its users — it’s essentially a Digg for bargains.

The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters.

But the very top of the site actually isn’t dictated by users. Instead, it’s dedicated to “Sponsored Deals”. Woot explains that these deals are paid for by advertisers, but that they’re still bargains:

OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section. Sponsored Deals are proposed to us by other retailers, manufacturers, and even other daily deal sites. If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here. Believe it or not, we have a reputation to uphold.

The site has been available for weeks before now, but was only available until members up until a few hours ago.

Adconion Media Group announced this morning that it has acquired certain key assets from Joost, the ill-fated online video service started by the infamous Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but it’s likely a firesale that isn’t bringing any returns to Joost’s investors.

Last June, Joost announced a change in its business strategy to focus on providing white-label video platforms, and Adconion says it plans to pursue this strategy. Notably, Adconion recently announced its first long-term licensing partnership as the exclusive display and video ad-serving solution for the Goldbach Media Group in Europe.

We had earlier put Joost on death watch, not in the least when its UK offices were dissolved and there was virtually no one left to comment on that story. It’s also worth noting that this morning’s news comes a mere two weeks after it was announced that Friis and Zennström had settled its lawsuits against eBay, the investor group that was purchasing Skype from eBay, early Joost backers Index Ventures and the online video company’s former CEO Mike Volpi.

On a sidenote: Index Ventures also happens to be a major investor in Adconion, having led its $80 million Series C round raised back in February 2008.

In a statement, Adconion CEO Tyler Moebius says about the Joost purchase: “Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution.”

Moebius added that the company would be contuining to operate Joost.com, providing clients with a destination site to showcase and distribute their branded entertainment content.

Prior to the acquisition, Adconion offered targeted distribution of content, including video and TV commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV. Through the Joost acquisition, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll ads across 2,000 publishers. Adconion claims to reach nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis.

As for Joost, here’s how Michael Arrington so eloquently put it when the company said it would be refocusing its business last Summer:

Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure – celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.

And the two Scandinavian entrepeneurs who co-founded Joost are now definitely moving on, having regained a stake and board seats in the new Skype and ready to launch a ‘new breed’ of online music service.

BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com. According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO’s Twitter feed, which will include updates from the new BNO wire service and other news organizations.

The @BreakingNews feed currently has about 1.4 million subscribers. MSNBC’s own breaking news feed only has 41,000 followers and the main MSNBC account only has 27,000 followers.

BNO News’ founder Michael van Poppel also announced that the company will focus on doing more original reporting. According to today’s press release, BNO News is also “in talks with other publishers.” Given that the company is now closely aligned with MSNBC, however, it remains to be seen if other publishers will be willing to work with BNO News.

iPhone App

Daniel E. Shipton, CEO of BitMethod, the developers of the push-enabled BNO News iPhone app, was less than pleased with today’s news. In a press release, Shipton states that he is “disappointed that BNO is choosing to leave behind their 1.4 million Twitter followers.” Indeed, it will be interesting to see how the @BreakingNews feed will change under the new management. The iPhone app will stay under BNO News’ control. It is not clear with it will continue to feature all the content from the MSNBC-managed @BreakingNews feed or just content from the new BNO news wire service.

Is This a Good Thing?

It was exciting to see the rise of BNO News over the last few months and today’s announcement comes as quite a surprise. BNO News was founded by Michael van Poppel, a 19-year old student in the Netherlands. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled the company in great detail earlier this year.

We are not sure why BNO News didn’t just make a deal with MSNBC to syndicate its feed. Given that BNO is a small business, chances are that the company just didn’t have the resources to run the news feed and build a wire service at the same time. With a stable income stream from syndication and its iPhone app however, we have to wonder why BNO News would leave its 1.4 million Twitter followers in the hands of MSNBC.

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch’s crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company’s sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead.

The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch’s claims that Google is “stealing” content rather than simply helping people find it.

The revelation comes from the Financial Times, which has a strong track record for accurate reportage – this is unlikely to be a fluffy rumor. The piece reads, in part:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

I say go for it. So, I’m sure, do all the other web publishers who see that removing many of the major news sites from Google will provide even more traffic for the upstarts. News Corp is merrily making itself irrelevant to web consumers, while continuing to use Google as its punch bag rather than addressing the radical transition of media into the online world.