Google Launches Themes Gallery for Chrome

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 05 Aug 2009

The good news is that Mountain View-based search engine giant Google has launched a themes gallery for its take on how a web browser should look and function. The bad news is that all the themes in there cannot be used with Google Chrome 2.0, only with Chrome 3.0 “and above.” The problem is that Chrome 3.0 is available only on the dev channel (latest version is Chrome 3.0.196.2) and on the Beta channel (latest version is Chrome 3.0.193.2), it is not available on the stable channel. Chrome 2.0 is available on the stable channel, but it does not provide support for the themes.

The regular user that wants to use a stable software product will find himself hard pressed to make the switch. Beta and Dev channel members on the other hand are used to running into bugs, so giving them something new to play with wouldn’t be a problem. And rightly so, because for the time being you can only install and uninstall (type chrome://extensions/ in the address bar) these themes, you cannot preview them in Chrome (just on the themes gallery web page) and there is no interface to manage them.

Chrome users have been asking Google to give them a means of customizing the web browser for quite some time, and now the company has complied. It is not an extremely enticing offering, as there are just 29 themes available for the moment, but it all has to start somewhere, doesn’t it? Speaking of enticing, there are some great looking themes in the gallery, but at the same time there are some that will have you saying “are people actually going to get this?”

Hopefully Google will catch up to Firefox Personas , which recently announced the fact its Personas Gallery exceeded the 20,000 mark. An extensive collection of skins for the Chrome browser couldn’t possibly hurt its popularity, unless they are as ugly as some in this initial offering.

You can check out the Google Chrome themes gallery here.




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