The beauty of open-source software like Google’s Chromium (on which its web-browser Chrome is based) is that there’s always someone willing to take the source code and take it in a new direction, or at least add new features missing from the original release. ChromePlus is one such program, taking Google’s increasingly popular browser and bolting on several new features to give it extra functionality.

At present, ChromePlus – which has just been updated to version 1.4.2.0 (fixing several bugs) – offers five features missing from Chrome: first is support for mouse gestures, enabling you to perform various actions by dragging the mouse in a certain way (for example, to scroll the page down, click and drag down the page using your right mouse button). The second feature is “super-drag”, which allows you to click and drag on a selected web link to open it in a new tab, or click and drag selected text to search it using your default search engine.

The IE tab enables you to open those webpages that don’t work in ChromePlus in a new tab using the Internet Explorer rendering engine, ensuring they function correctly, while you can also double-click tabs to close them. The final additional feature is support for third-party download tools – if you’ve installed the likes of NetAnts, FlashGet3 or WebThunder (among others), you can right-click a download link to download it using one of these tools.

The latest version of ChromePlus is now available for free download.