- Google is working on a new version of Chrome for Android that supports browser extensions.
- Specifically, the company is experimenting with “desktop” builds of Chrome for Android.
- These “desktop” builds are currently intended for Chromebooks as they transition to use more parts of Android, but there’s hope the work will benefit mobile devices, too.
There are a lot of web browsers available for Android, but the one most people use is Chrome for Android. The Android-optimized version of Google’s Chrome browser is preinstalled on most Android devices and is fast, easy to use, and has a lot of features. One big feature that Chrome for Android has been missing all these years, though, is support for browser extensions. Google finally appears to be working on a version of Chrome for Android that supports browser extensions, but there’s a catch: it likely won’t be available for mobile devices.
If you want to be technical, it’s already possible to use Chrome extensions on Android, but you’ll have to download a third-party Chromium-based browser to do so. That’s because Google decided way back to not add extension support to mobile versions of Chrome, likely to limit the number of people installing Chrome extensions to block ads on their Android phones. Whether that decision was successful is debatable given the popularity of ad blocking apps for Android, but in any case, this decision shut down the ability to install other useful browser extensions.