ReadWriteWeb

Here an app store, there an app store, everywhere an app store. 2011 is quickly becoming a year of app stores, with each browser offering its own marketplace of Web apps. What's a multi-browser user to do in this world?

Kynetx, a cross-browser platform for browser extensions and apps, wants to give both developers and users a one-stop shop for apps that don't discriminate according to what browser you use for what task. The company has launched an app store of its own for something it's calling "browser apps."

The developer's version of the Google Chrome Web browser was updated this week to include the ability to sync your extensions. The new feature joins Chrome's other sync options, in place for some time (Bookmarks, Preferences and Themes), to more fully round out the browser's synchronization platform.

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser. Already we've seen a handful of these become available, including AdSweep, a PageRank checker, Cleeki, and, as of yesterday, a new bookmarking extension from Delicious. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out of reach.

Cooliris, the browser extension that launches a 3D visual search interface to the web, has just updated their application with what at first seems to be just a minor upgrade. But don't be fooled, this small change to the Cooliris add-on is actually going to have a major impact on the product's usability.

So, what's different? As of today, Cooliris will no longer launch into a full-screen 3D browser when activated. Instead, Cooliris will launch into a separate browser tab. This change was heavily requested by Cooliris users, a multi-tasking bunch of folks who wanted to be able to quickly switch back and forth between Cooliris's 3D web and all the other open tabs and applications running on their computers.

Ubiquity, the experimental Firefox add-on that lets you tell your browser what to do by typing in natural language commands, has just been updated to version 0.5. This preview release adds support for more languages, which is great news for non-English speakers dying to get their hands on this cutting-edge technology. What's more fascinating about this update, however, is the new way that Ubiquity works to understand your input. Instead of being limited only to what it already knows, it can now reach out and query web services to help it figure out what your input means.

Did our browser just get smarter?

During the Google I/O conference this week, one of the presentations from Day 1 was on the subject of Google Chrome's extension system. The long-awaited feature will finally deliver what Firefox and IE users have had for ages: a way to add more tools, services, and additional features to the browser.

It's somewhat hard to describe KwiClick in just a few words. KwiClick is a Firefox plugin that combines a number of seemingly unconnected functions in one. Among other things, it allows you to quickly perform searches by highlighting and right-clicking on any word in Firefox, and the results are displayed in a dedicated pop-up window, so that you don't have to actually browse to Google or Yahoo to see your search results. But at the same time, it also integrates with YouTube and other video services, so that you can play videos in the KwiClick pop-up window while you continue to browse the web.

Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is Pixelpipe's new drag-and-drop uploader. This utility lets you upload media directly from your computer or the web to any of the 75 plus services you've configured at Pixelpipe.com.

Reframe It, a social web annotation tool we first reviewed last Fall, just announced that it has added integration with Twitter and Facebook to its features today. Thanks to this, users can now syndicate their annotations to both Twitter and Facebook, where they can continue their discussions with friends who are not using Reframe It yet.

Reframe It also announced that it has added Lawrence Lessig, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, and Clay Shirky to its Advisory Board, which already includes an all-star line-up of Internet luminaries like Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Howard Rheingold.