The great thing about open-source software such as Google’s Chromium (on which the popular Chrome web browser is based) is that there is always somebody prepared to take the source code and move it in a new direction, or at any rate add new or better things lacking from the original program. ChromePlus is one of these things, taking Google’s progressively popular browser and sticking on various new features to give it additional functionality.

Now, ChromePlus – which recently updated to version 1.4.2.0 (repairing several bugs) – provides 5 features lacking from Chrome: firstly is support for mouse gestures, letting you execute various actions by dragging the mouse in a certain manner (for instance, to scroll the page down, click and drag down the page using your right mouse button). The 2nd feature is “super-drag”, which lets you click and drag on a chosen weblink to open it up in a new tab, or click and drag selected text to search it using your default search engine.

The IE tab allows you to view those webpages that don’t work in ChromePlus in a new tab using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, seeing to it they work right, whilst you can also double-click tabs to close them. The last extra feature is support for third-party download tools – if you’ve installed stuff like NetAnts, FlashGet3 or WebThunder (among others), you can right-click a download link to download it utilizing one of these tools.

Another thing worth mentioning is the privacy features are entirely customizable, a big difference from chrome.

The latest version of ChromePlus is now available for free download. Check out the homepage at chromeplus.org

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.