December 3, 2009

My first Chrome Extension – Simple Print

I’ve been really enjoying Google Chrome lately.

I had been a big fan of Firefox for many years, but after playing around for a while with the dev channel versions of Chrome -called Chromium- I have come to really appreciate the speed increase I get using Chrome/Chromium instead of Firefox. Now that Chrome has the ability to have addons – extensions as they’re called in Chrome – I have very little need for Firefox anymore.  There are however some things from Firefox that I miss. Small things, like the ability to have a “Print” button on your toolbar.  So I scrounged around a bit and after some trial and error I came up with my first chrome plugin “Simple Print”

It is very, very simple.  All it does it put a print button on your chrome bar.  You click the button and it brings up a print dialog.  That’s it.  It may get more features eventually, but for now, It is just a print button.

Simple Print Screenshot

If you’re interested you can download and install it here!

Simple Print
Simple Print

UPDATE:  I’m on the official Google Chrome Extensions Gallery

Note that you will need to have the beta or  dev channel version of Chrome installed.  you can find that here http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/ or here http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

I have tested this on Ubuntu 9.10, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 it seems to work on all of them.

It’s a super simple addon, but if you’re interested in the source code drop me a line. The icon used came from the “humanitarian” gnome icon theme available here.

EDIT:

There seems to be some problems with my extension right now (not printing or printing blank pages only) I’m working hard to figure it out, when I’ve got it I’ll update it here and if you have it installed it should automatically update your copy as well. I have reason to believe that it (and the two other print extensions that have since popped up) are broken because of this bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29621