14 DAY TRIAL // Google is cracking down on extensions that are slowing down your browser experience as it updates the Chrome Web Store policy to dictate that extensions must have a single purpose.
According to a blog post signed by Chrome’s Engineering Director Erik Kay, extensions designed with a single purpose have always been Google’s intent. However, not all extensions have respected this.
“These multi-purpose extensions can crowd your browser UI and slow down your web browsing – sometimes significantly. We’re making this policy change to fix these problems and give users more control over their browsing experience,” says Kay.
To this extent, Chrome extensions will need to have a single visible UI “surface” in Chrome, a single browser action or page action button. Toolbars aren’t supported by design and users would get more control over which features they add to the browser.
“Unfortunately, in some cases, we couldn't enforce these design goals technically. With content scripts, extension developers have full control over the page, so they can put up as much UI as they want, even going as far as to create toolbars in the page,” Kay writes.
“Others used content scripts to create extensions with more subtle features bundled together that were harder to attribute to specific extensions. In many cases, the Chrome Web Store helped by showing poor reviews when users had noticed bad behavior from a particular extension, but in other cases the connection wasn't clear,” the director adds.
The company understands that in order to comply with the new Chrome Web Store policy, developers will have to implement significant changes for their extensions or even to split them into multiple separate ones.
So, the new policy will be enforced starting June 2014 for extensions that are already present in the store. Any new ones added from this day forward will need to abide by the new policy guidelines immediately.