Extension support comes to Safari 5.0.1

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) released Safari 5.0.1 on July 28 as an incremental update with a very important new feature: Official support for browser extensions. Small widgets that allow the user to customize the supported browser, extensions have long been available for competing browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chrome. As they say, better late than never.

Apple released extension support to developers back in June, giving developers some time to create extensions for the Safari Extensions Gallery. There are already around 100 extensions ranging from Bookmarking extensions, supporting features like Delicious and Instapaper, to social networking ones that work with Facebook and Twitter.

Noted Brian Croll, a vice president of product marketing at Apple, "We're thrilled to see so many leading developers creating great extensions and think our users are going to love being able to customize Safari."

You can go to extensions.apple.com to see extensions that are promoted by Apple. If you don't like those suggestions, however, many sites have already started touting their list of the "best" or "killer" extensions to install. You can access a couple of them here and here. Since Apple doesn't control the distribution of extensions, as it does with the App Store, the number of extensions is expected to skyrocket pretty quickly.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Telegraph.co.uk
- check out this article at eWeek

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