by Stephen Shankland
July 1, 2009 2:17 PM PDT

Yahoo has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google's browser. Extensions still must be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology clearly is immature.

But Google is steadily addressing the concern that its browser lacks one of Firefox's notable features--called add-ons in the Mozilla browser. "Delicious extension (alpha version) for Google Chrome is now available," said Amit Papnai of the Delicious team in a mailing list posting Tuesday. "This is a light version of the extension and allows you to sign in and post bookmarks to your Delicious account."

Extensions can be powerful tools to customize a browser's interface or add significant features. In an effort to ease programming difficulties, Chrome's extensions technology uses the same interface techniques as Web pages, a method Mozilla as adopted for its Jetpack Firefox extensions project at Mozilla Labs. Delicious lets people store, tag, describe, and share bookmarks, and the add-on simplifies use of the service directly through the browser.

In addition, Nick Baum released a Chrome-based Twitter extension called Chritter on Tuesday. I found both the Delicious and Chritter extensions easy to download and install, though Chritter isn't terribly useful at this stage because it only flashes recent tweets in a status bar. Update 2:57 p.m. PDT: Google has added a rough but workable interface for managing Chrome extensions, including uninstalling them, by typing "chrome://extensions/" into the address bar.