Did Google just take the next step in making extensions play a more interesting role in Google Chrome? Possibly, but at least now we can trim our command line switches down a little.
Those of you running Chrome's bleeding-edge developer channel builds can now drop the --enable-extensions switch. They're now supported by default.

Of course, that assumes you've bothered to enable them in the first place. After using Chrome almost exclusively for about a month, I found that I had amassed a nice collection of Userscripts and bookmarklets but had yet to find a truly interesting extension. XMarks is getting close, and the LastPass team is also hard at work.

New updates to the developer documents have also been published, so perhaps that will help things take off.

At any rate, it's the "first step in [the] launch process," according to Chromium developer Aaron Boodman. Next stop: the beta channel.

Aaron's blog post also indicates that the UI may change by the time the jump to beta happens. That'd be nice, because the puffy, light-blue bar at the bottom of the browser window? It's not going to win any UI beauty contests.