Coders and developers will love to be able to take advantage of all the hidden treasures behind Chrome. TCP/UDP socket support is an example of this, a feature that has long existed in other browsers, but Chrome was staying away from for security reasons. That is until lately, though, as Google now supports TCP and UDP sockets for Chrome extensions.
This opens many doors of possibilities, especially for those interested in P2P networking. But if you want to play around with other things, you can get adventurous. For example, Koushik Dutta (from ClockworkMod) was recently playing around and created a web server extension.
He calls it Browser Inception, because he made a website that says “Hello” from the Chrome Extension web server, which then he accessed via Chrome. It was a fun and simple “20-minute hack” he had fun with, but it could bring so many possibilities for businesses and other teams. Webservers, chat clients, sharing capabilities and other P2P extensions are just some of the things that can be done.
It all comes with a bit of risk, though. If unsecured, malicious websites and/or other extensions can hack into your TCP/UDP end-points. Not so nice, right? Be careful if you plan to actually use these, and make sure you, or whoever controls these features, secures the extension. Otherwise, have fun nerding out! Can you guys think of other good uses?
[via Koushik Dutta]
