What helps extend Chrome OS is support for web extensions. Here are a few of the more useful ones I turn to on a regular basis. The best part: All of these work with the Chrome browser too, so you don’t need a Chromebook to use use then. While many extensions are simply shortcuts to web sites or apps, these have become my go-to extensions:

Clearly by Evernote (install). I’ve long used Evernote’s cloud service to store ideas, images and general information. It’s no surprise to me that the company recently picked up $85 million in funding for enterprise workers to do the same. With the Clearly extension, it’s easy to clip items from the web and have them available on every other device I own. But that’s not what I use it for. Instead, with one button tap, the web extension clears all the clutter from any web page and presents it in an easy-to-read format, much like the Reader function does in Apple’s Safari browser. Evernote Premium subscribers can even use Clearly to read web content aloud in one of 21 languages.

Pocket (install). This web-clipping service certainly overlaps with Evernote, but I simply like the presentation of web pages better, especially on my mobile devices. The former Read It Later service became Pocket and with its cross-platform support, I generally use it on my Chromebook to send pages to the cloud for later reading on my iPad mini or Galaxy Note 2 smartphone. It’s simple to use too: Just tap the extension button when viewing any web page and you’re done. Once the page is sent to your Pocket account, you can add tags for aiding in content organization.

Save to Google Drive (install). This one is relatively new, having just been added by Google recently. But boy is it useful for a Chromebook user; especially someone who recently joined the Chromebook team and got 100 GB of Google Drive storage included with their laptop purchase. This extension that adds a button to save web page links, documents and even media files appears in a right-click context menu, making it easy to save local storage space on your Chromebook.

Any.DO (install). I previously reviewed the Any.DO task management app and since it’s effective and works on all of my devices, I still use it. The Any.DO web extension brings my tasks to the Chromebook, allowing me to see what I need to be working on next. The extension syncs tasks and reminders to my other devices so I don’t have to manage tasks differently depending on what phone or tablet I happen to be using when away from the Chromebook.

Send using Gmail (install). Google has its own official extension that I was using to send links over email, but I replaced it with this instead for one simple reason: I wanted to save space on the Chromebook. Instead of having yet another web extension button, this handy bit of code adds an option to “Email this page address” without a button. To access it, just use a two-finger tap on your Chromebook trackpad when viewing a web page and you’ll see the option in a pop-up menu. Choose it, add your recipients and hit send. Note that this extension places occasional ads on your web pages, but you can disable them in the settings.

Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate (install). The Chrome OS has built-in screen capture and image editing features but I find this extension to better fit my workflow. It also provides more options: You can capture a selected area of the screen, for example. And it’s simple to mark up an image or annotate it prior to saving. The only issue I have with this extension is that you manually have to right-click to save your captured image. There is a native option to save an image locally, but it doesn’t seem to work on the Chrome OS.

Of course, these extensions help me focus on what I use my Chromebook for: Mostly web browsing and blogging at work. (OK, I admit I have the Facebook extension installed too.) But the Chrome extension site likely has something for everyone these days. And although many people consider living in a browser too limiting an environment — for some it surely is — these extensions can help turn Chrome OS into more than just a browser.

Got any favorite extensions for Chromebooks or the Chrome browser? Drop them in the comments and I’ll take a look!

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So what’s Famo.us

Famo.us is the brainchild of CEO Newcomb, a co-founder of Powerset, a search-engine company that was acquired by Microsoft and now is part of the Bing. His co-founder is Mark Lu, who is also the head of engineering for the company. The company has only ten employees and has raised about $1.1 million in seed funding from the likes of InterWest Partners, Greylock Partners, CrunchFund, Javelin Venture Partners, Matt Ocko and Barney Pell.

Famo.us has developed technology that makes it easy to write HTML5-based apps and perform like native apps — as long as there is a modern browser and a modern OS, mobile or otherwise. In addition, these HTML5 apps get the added benefits of their web roots; for instance, they can be indexed by Google. Newcomb believes that as more “screens” become prevalent in our lives – PC, tablets, phones, television and the car – developers and companies will need ways to reach their audience through those screens. Today’s model of developing for one platform at a time doesn’t quite scale.

There is no doubt that Famo.us is entering crowded waters and will be jostling for developer attention from other mobile-oriented frameworks such as Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile and Appcelerator Titanium. Newcomb, however, believes their focus on performance gives them an edge. In order for HTML5 apps to meet the native app experience, the performance needs to be between 40-to-60 frames per second, Newcomb says. They need to be jitter-less and flicker-less. ”We built an engine and then a car around it,” he explains, when asked to compare his product with others.

Anthony Wing Kosner, a web-content guru and a blogger for Forbes.com, in an illuminating article about Famo.us put it best when he wrote:

If the original HTML specifications were designed for navigating hierarchies of documents, HTML 5 was designed to enable web pages to be more like applications. But this “more like” has turned out to be a sticky point. Web browsers are still optimized for the display of documents, and applications—apps—are not collections of documents. More properly, apps are dynamically generated views of data that a user can directly manipulate. In a Venn diagram, there is an overlap between web pages and apps—many websites dynamically generate views of document based content—but it is the ways that they differ that have given developers problems. The difference in the amount of interaction between an app, its data and its user is of a high enough order that it is like the difference between different dimensions.

Game on: Apps not documents

Later, when I talked to Newcomb, the Famo.us approach became even more clear. He argues that in today’s world, most mobile browsers are using the WebKit rendering engine and that was developed to display document — it is essentially made up of WebCore and Javascript Core. WebCore renders documents. Famo.us renders apps.

As Kosner says, today’s apps aren’t documents — so Newcomb and Lu decided they were better off writing their own rendering engine, and in doing so, they were taking a cue from the video gaming business. While some video game developers write their own game rendering engine that powers their games, many more try and use game rendering technology developed by other companies to build games. In that sense, Canvas for 2D games and WebGL for 3D games are analogous to Famo.us.

For a developer, nothing much changes: each app developer includes tiny bits of Famo.us specific code in their app. The first time an app is accessed, the Famo.us javascript libraries are downloaded to the client and that’s that. The data comes from a datastore and via JSON goes through the Famo.us rendering engine which in turn taps into the graphic processor unit (GPU) and displays the app on the browser in a manner befitting the screen it is being displayed on.

And now for the news

Newcomb told us that he was surprised by the number of people interested in his technology. A few thousand app developers have already signed up for the service, though it will be a few months before Famo.us is available in beta. The company has introduced a new sandbox so that developers can play around with the technology and some of the key features.

At present the demo will work on any modern computer running Chrome or Safari or Dolphin with keyboard and mouse controls, iPad and iPhone iOS 4.2 to iOS 6, Android phones and tablets with Jelly Bean or Ice Cream Sandwich with Chrome or Dolphin with JetPack. It also works on Samsung SmartTVs 2010 and later.

Many of the capabilities on show should be enough to lure developers, says Newcomb. The plan for the business is to offer Famo.us under a GPL license to non-commercial users — but anyone who has commercial aspirations will need to pay $99 fee for a non-GPS license and will be able to get access to between 10-and-20 templates that can be modified to build apps. Famo.us is currently looking for developers who’d like to build famo.us app templates – which are core design patterns archetypes found in the iOS app store.

Why Famo.us matters

I am of the belief that apps of tomorrow have to be data informed and as such need to be able to take in a lot of information, and render it in a simple and easy to use, touch-oriented manner. So, when Newcomb announced the company and showed his demo at Disrupt, I got quite excited because I believed that they had developed technology that would allow us to solve the vexing problem of a data soaked future.

At Disrupt, Newcomb showed off a periodic table that could be manipulated to call up data behind each element. Now imagine a similar immersive interface that sits in front of Pinterest, eBay or Mr. Porter for a new kind of online store front. Or imagine a brand new way of interacting with Facebook photos and data. You get the drift!

The real opportunity for the company could be working with larger players who desperately need a way to stay relevant in the bi-polar world of Apple and Google. In a time when we are swimming in a sea of mediocre and meh startups, Famo.us clearly has a big, hairy audacious idea. Today it is almost famous. And if things go right – that is, developers sign up – then Famo.us will truly be worthy of its name.

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Since all work on a Chromebook is done in the browser — you can’t install software on the laptop — Chrome 21 is the biggest part of the update, which all machines will get over the next few days.

But there’s more than just a better browser: user interface changes, a newer version of Adobe Flash, support for more wired and wireless devices, and new plug-in versions are all included.

Here’s a rundown of some of the changes Chromebook users can expect after the update:

• A redesigned App list that doesn’t require a new screen; you can use it on the main desktop area
• A new print dialog that integrates Google Cloud Print devices
• Custom wallpaper
• Offline support to work in the Google Docs app
• LTE support in the modem manager
• Support for standard USB audio devices and wireless gamepads
• Updated plug-ins for GTalk and Netflix
• A three-finger tap works as a middle button on the trackpad

I’m most excited for the wireless gamepad support and it’s likely the first feature I’ll try after I get the update. If you look at my video overview of the Chromebook, you’ll see me show off an incredible web-based game called Bastion at the 9:15 mark of the vid:

The problem is: I don’t often play it because I’m terrible at navigating through game play on a keyboard. With wireless gamepad support that issue is addressed and I should be able to use the gamepad with my Android tablets as well.

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The application is a bit of a combination of Dropbox and Evernote, letting users store videos, articles, images and even PDFs in the cloud. The application then automatically downloads that content to mobile and tablet devices for consuming later. But the sharing aspect, and how people have begun using it, is what is really interesting and a real opportunity, according to founder Avichal Garg.

While Facebook and other services are enabling so-called frictionless sharing of what our friends and contacts are watching and consuming at any given time, that has also resulted in a lot of noise and not a whole lot of signal. It is hard to know what’s good and what’s not. So what Spool hopes to do is to enable users to more easily share relevant content within groups.

The idea sprung out of usage that the Spool team was seeing among its users and its own staff. Garg explained that the startup’s employees were sharing links and stories within the company and found that other users were doing the same. Those shared links then show up in a users’ Spools for reading later, just as though they bookmarked them themselves. That kind of application could be helpful for sharing relevant documents and news among enterprise team members, for instance.

It has become an interesting market opportunity for Spool, as the company looks to leverage both user stickiness and network effects to bring in new users. “No one owns the market for small group sharing,” Garg told us in a meeting last week. As more users become hooked, the company is more likely to convert them into paying users.

The San Francisco–based startup has also seen a large increase in the number of users signing up after being featured on the Android Market. While Spool was featured, Garg said it was seeing ten times the number of downloads and sign-ups that it usually received. Retention rates vary, but Garg said that once someone becomes an active user, they are not likely to quit.

“If we get you using Spool, we know you’ll probably still be around in three months,” he said.

Spool recently closed a $1 million round of financing from investors like SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Start Fund and Charles River Ventures, as well as angels Vivi Nevo, Steve Chen, Elad Gil, Deep Nishar, Kevin Donahue, Joe Lonsdale, Bill Lohse, David King, Nils Johnson, Matt Ocko and Raymond Tonsing.

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I probably should have looked closer at Evernote prior to Clearly, because the product has supported web clipping for ages. And it has clients for most of the mobile platforms out there today: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and even webOS. Clearly includes the same web clipping technology Evernote already had, but adds another key function: Cleaner reading of web pages on the desktop. In fact, its very similar to the Reader function in Apple’s Safari browser because it removes everything from a web page except for the content and then presents it in a clean, easy to read format.

Evernote Clearly is available for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and I’ve been using more and more on the desktop to view web pages. There are three themes available to view web content — Newsprint, Notable and Night Owl — and you can quickly modify the text between three different sizes. Once I started to use Clearly to read on the desktop it only made sense to start clipping pages to Evernote for offline viewing, as the button to do so is right there in the browser extension.

This add-on won’t help you save web content for offline use if you’re already reading it on a mobile device, but it’s superb for saving web pages from the desktop for later reading on a mobile. The pages are saved as standard notes in the Evernote client, which is available on nearly all mobile devices. I’m finding this to be the best option for the way I work right now, and something worth a try for anyone who uses a mobile device for reading offline content; especially if you’re already using Evernote for something else.

Obviously, it’s not the only option. If you’re embedded in the iOS and OS X world, then Instapaper probably makes the most sense, as does the Reader function in Safari. Besides, iOS 5 brought the “Read Later” function to iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices.

Android users might prefer Read It Later for offline web reading, especially if the Dolphin Browser is the web client of choice. Why? There’s a Read It Later extension for the mobile browser. But even the stock browser in Android can share or save pages to Read It Later. I was relying on both of these methods, depending on which device I was using at the time, but with Evernote Clearly, I’m well covered on the desktop and any mobile device I use thanks to the Evernote client.

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The HTTP Archive charted the growth of the average web page and found that average web pages have grown from 726 KB a year ago to 965 KB now. The 33 percent jump is due in large part to more images and third-party scripts like ads and analytics. Javascript content, spurred on by the rise of HTML5, has grown over the last year by 44.7 percent, according to analysis by Royal Pingdom.

This, of course, is nothing new. The average web page has been growing in size year over year. Back in 1995, the average web page was 14.1 KB. But with the rise of new capped mobile broadband plans, it adds an additional wrinkle for mobile users who have to submit to these limits. Even if they don’t change their behavior, their data usage on mobile browsers will continue to expand with the size of web pages.

This is another good reminder that web sites should invest in mobile optimized sites. Not only do they appear better and load faster on mobile devices but they also have the potential to ease the data crunch on users by presenting a more streamlined page. A survey in June commissioned by Google and the Mobile Marketing Association found that only 33 percent of U.S. businesses have mobile optimized sites. Consumers are also increasingly showing their impatience with sites that don’t load well on mobile devices.

The growing size of web pages might also might push more consumers toward data compression options like Opera’s mobile browser, Skyfire’s browser and Onavo’s data crunching service. And it’s going to have to ultimately force carriers to reconsider where they want to set their data tiers. The existing plans may keep most of users under the caps for now. But with rising usage, not to mention the growing size of web pages, the average user’s data consumption will be shifting upward over time.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mking1783

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I took the iOS version of Dolphin Browser for a spin on my iPod touch and found it useful, but limited as compared to its Android counterpart. I’m a fan of tabbed browsing, and it is faster to navigate through open web pages in Dolphin over the native Safari browser. I also like the presentation of Dolphin’s Webzine view over the Reader function in the upcoming iOS 5 software. Dolphin also supports more than two dozen gestures for browser navigation, toggling settings, or quickly loading a particular webpage, although the gesture function requires a tap before drawing. Full-screen / desktop mode is an option as is private browsing.

Similar to Opera’s browser, Dolphin has a customizable Speed Dial feature where you can set up favorite sites; tapping the URL field on a blank tab brings up the stored sites. Next to the URL address bar is a button to share a web page via Twitter or Facebook. Standard bookmarking is also available and easy to get to. Just like in the Android version, you can swipe the browser “off screen” to the right to see bookmarks. Swiping the browser to the left provides one-touch choices for Full Screen mode, Downloads, a gesture, clearing browsing data or additional options.

Overall, the browser is relatively fast and feature-filled; at least for a first version. Just as Safari does, Dolphin scored the maximum 100 points when I ran the Acid3 test, showing compliance with JavaScript and other web standards. And for the SunSpider test, which checks JavaScript performance, Dolphin scored a laggy 11,512 milliseconds while Safari turned in a far faster score of 3,660.9 ms. Note: Lower is better, indicating that Safari will handle JavaScript much faster. Overall, I found Dolphin rendered pages nearly as quickly, however.

But there’s a huge barrier to adoption for any third-party browser on an iOS device which could keep many from even trying the Dolphin Browser: Apple allows one, and only one, app to be the native web browser, and that’s Safari. That means any tapped links from email, Twitter or other sources will always open up in Safari. It’s an inconvenience that some won’t want to deal with, which is a shame, because Dolphin for iOS looks promising.

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