Lusting for the speed of Chrome, but enjoying the convenience of Firefox’s central plugin repository? Soon you won’t have to choose. Developer builds of Google’s browser currently feature support for extensions, but those extensions live in unofficial repositories like ChromeExtensions.org and ChromePlugins.org. Now Google has opened its official Chrome extensions gallery to uploads from developers.

In true Google fashion, almost everything about the new gallery will be automated. Only extensions that do two particularly sensitive things — “those that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect “file://” URLs,” says software engineer Lei Zheng — will get manual review. All the rest will be left to the judgement of a user rating system. Even extension updates will be rolled out the same way as Chrome updates: automatically.

Unfortunately, all you brave souls running Chrome developer builds can’t download extensions from the gallery yet. For those of you who aren’t as adventurous, the upcoming Chrome 4 beta will feature extensions support. Let’s check back on the gallery soon, so we can all pimp our Chromes.

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