Apple Launches Official Safari Extensions Gallery

Today, Apple launched their Safari Extensions Gallery on the aptly named extensions.apple.com a bit earlier than expected (they publicly stated an August release date). Along with it came a necessary Safari update to move extensions out of the Debug menu and into the Safari menu, front and center (so there's no need to remember that URL).

My guess is that Apple was forced to push this out a few weeks sooner than they wanted because of the security issues that became publicized, particularly the recently discovered exploit that allowed contact information to be automatically filled into forms and grabbed via AJAX.

For now, at least, the gallery appears to be a fully manually managed static page with a number of categories, which you can see in the screenshot after the jump. There's a general lack of information about each extension, like some good links to the extension page, though surely this is the fault of the developer not including a good URL in the extension package. Maybe Apple's got bigger plans.

The new version of Safari also adds functionality for a quick "Install Now" button. This is done with some Javascript on the extensions page, which I expect (hope?) could be replicated on any website to enable a quick install button. Anybody figure this one out yet? Please give me a pointer.

There's an interesting mix of extensions available in the first iteration of the gallery. Most of the ones I expected to be there are there. And there are some that I'm surprised at. Based on earlier communications, I expected that Apple was going to be a bit more strict about what they include. Most notably, the inclusion of the Daring Fireball Comments extension, which was pretty much done as a prank. I guess the gallery editors over at Apple thought it was funny that Gruber got punk'd and did it for the lulz.

As it stands, the extensions gallery is not killing off the third party extension galleries like the safariextensions.tumblr which remains useful as it lists all extensions and safariextensions.org which appears to have a more strict inclusion policy and perhaps carries more risk of being made redundant by Apple's offering and can perhaps stay relevant with timely updates.

We here at PimpMySafari will continue to write about all things Safari, with excellent new extensions playing no small part.