14 DAY TRIAL // On the Chromium project's blog, the Google has team just announced it will start disabling the inline installation feature for misbehaving developers.
The feature, introduced in 2011 with Google Chrome 15, allows developers who create Chrome extensions to trigger installation procedures from outside the Chrome Web Store.
As even the Chrome team observed, while incredibly useful and properly used by most developers, the inline installation feature, as it's technically referred to, was also the source of many security and privacy-related complaints from its userbase.
This relates to situations where users were tricked into installing "one thing" but were actually being served unwanted Chrome extensions instead.
Now, the team plans to disable access to this feature for any extension that was linked to deceptive installation tactics in the past.
The new policy will take hold starting with September 3, and according to Google, will only affect 0.2% of all extensions.
For any extension that falls under this ban, inline installation operations will redirect the user to its official Chrome Web Store page.
"It’s an important step to maintain a healthy extension ecosystem for users and the vast majority of extension developers who don’t use deceptive tactics," says the Google team.