It is amazing how quickly we forget, just over a year ago saw the release of a rather buggy browser named Google Chrome. Our own staff, generally quick to praise Google, even had a few doubts. Today, the beta version of Google Chrome supports extensions and we are now at the point of seeing what impact Google Chrome will really have on the browser share market in the year to come.

Already Google Chrome has overtaken Opera, which is a much more mature offering, with some sources giving it a 4.66% share for November 2009 and Google has quietly upped the ante recently. One of the major detractions of Chrome was its lack of support for extensions, something that made users stick to Firefox as their default browser. However, if you install the beta build here (which I use and is stable), you can now install any number of extensions from the official gallery here - also worth reading ten must-have extensions here. Google themselves are incorporating search features into extensions, like Similar Pages, which will preview and explore pages similar to the one you are browsing on the fly.

Extensions is the big one but to grab an even bigger slice of the browser share market in 2010 Google needs to do a little more, and they have… Mac users can now download a beta release of Chrome, something OS X users have been waiting for. Linux users haven’t been left out either, there is now a beta release of Chrome for Linux available and both versions support extensions as well.

The Chrome marketing team are exploring other avenues as well. Whilst tech-savvy PC users will know what Chrome is, your average internet user might not be as up-to-date. If you have used Internet Explorer and navigated to the Google home page you will probably have noticed a little box prompting you to install a ‘faster‘ browser. Not stopping there, anyone downloading and installing the very popular Avast! antivirus software will now be prompted to installl Google Chrome as well. This agreement by Google is a very clever one, Avast! is soon to release version 5 and sometime this month will be celebrating it’s 100,000,000th user (that’s 100 million!), giving Chrome a much better distribution point, as it is not bundled with Windows (like Internet Explorer) and does not have the historical user base of Firefox. To top it all off, you can even give ChromeForChristmas, a site dedicated to distributing a gift-wrapped Chrome download to whomever you choose!

The very essence of Google Chrome (and the upcoming Chrome OS) is speed, that’s why people like it. Getting even more speed is tricky, Opera uses Turbo, a compression technology, but Google has gone one step further, launching it’s own Public DNS, hoping to make web surfing even faster. I used the DNS myself in combination with namebench, which is an open-source DNS benchmark utility from Google, and the results were interesting. Though Google’s new public DNS server was not faster for myself, namebench did discover an alternative (and faster) DNS, which I confirmed using Speedtest.net. Recommended if you have the knowledge to change your DNS settings (or read a tutorial here), be patient as running the namebench test took about 10 minutes.

Though not one for predictions, all these factors seem to indicate Google Chrome having a much larger browser market share by this time next year, and that is disregarding the upcoming release of Chrome OS - watch this space!