An extension system has been one of the most requested features for Chrome, said Software Engineers Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman in the .

"It's a tribute to Mozilla and the Firefox project that nowadays, users just expect all browsers to have built-in extensibility," they said. Google team members sought to build an extensions system that is easy to use, stable, more secure, and that would not slow down Chrome, the engineers said.

Extensions, they said, "are as easy to create as Web pages." The Google Chrome multiprocess architecture, meanwhile, has been used to keep extensions stable and said, Kay and Boodman said.

The beta system debuts for Windows and Linux, with extensions for the Mac still a work in progress.