I have a tendency to keep a bunch of apps open at once, and when of those applications is Firefox my entire system quickly drags to a crawl. With Chrome taking less room in RAM, everything seems to run faster.

When Chrome Mac beta first came out I tried to make it my default for a while, but the lack of extensions sent me back to Firefox. Not being able to organize/sync bookmarks was a bit of a deal breaker.

Now, finally, the dev channel of Chrome has extensions and I'm happy to be back. I know Chromium has had extensions for a while. That's a bit too on-the-edge for me. Too much updating. Frankly, the way Google does "beta" it's more like the dev version is the beta while the beta is a release version.

I spent a day or so playing with available extensions (love that you don't have to restart the browser in between) and here's some of my favorites of the 12 I've installed so far. Only thing sorely missing from my toolbar is 1Password. I'm cutting/pasting my logins and manually updating them which is a bit of a pain. Come on AWS, the water is only a tiny bit chilly now…it will warm up. Jump!

I'm neurotic about inbox zero, and I like this so much better than any of the Google notifier add-ins I tried in Firefox. Google Apps friendly. I don't have to keep an email tab open all the time anymore! Badge shows the message, making it easy to delete/archive messages without going to full Gmail interface. Only glitch is that it appears to be using UTC time zone with no option to match the time stamp to my clock.

Chrome Mac still doesn't allow for reorganizing bookmarks. That's okay. All my bookmarks were already in XMarks and now they're syncing with Chrome. When I want to reorganize/edit my bookmarks, I just log in to the Xmarks site and do it there. I prefer this over Google's built-in bookmark sync because this way I can easily go back to Firefox or Safari at any time. And I even have synced bookmarks in Internet Explorer on the Windows side, although I rarely use it.

Chromed Bird and Facebook:

Great for quick sneak peeks to the social networks. I don't seem to get as distracted if I can just peek as opposed to loading the full interface. I tried Brizzly, which looks prettier, but it was slow and had more quirks. These two very simple extensions more than do the job for quick glances. When I want to spend more time in Twitter, I'll log in to Hootsuite. I long gave up on desktop Twitter apps because they took up too much precious RAM.

My wish at this point is for a way to arrange the icons on the toolbar.

Fellow Mac users who have moved to Chrome…what extensions do you like?