At the link below is a quick Chrome Omnibox extension to support HDFS browsing. Basically you type in "hdfs" and a space, then the simplified file path, which is the hostname without a port followed by the pathname.
As an example using a node called "bad-qa-apahad", if you type hdfs then space then enter the following:
bad-qa-apahad/user/hive/warehouse/customer
You should see something like this: 
Then when you hit enter it will build and load the browse URL for you:
The current version assumes HTTP (not HTTPS) protocol, a browse port of 50075, and a NameNode info port of 50070.
To install, open a Chrome tab pointing to chrome://chrome/extensions/ and drag the CRX file (saved from the above link) onto the page.
I welcome your questions, comments, and suggestions, feel free to email me at mburgess@pentaho.com.