Chrome Disallowing Extension Installs Outside Of Webstore

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091618

This is currently enforced in the dev channel.

So it would seem that they are implementing measures in the web store.

 

Interesting, thanks. I don't know how others feel, but I'm concerned about the ever increasing focus on centralized software stores (Google, Apple, Microsoft especially). On one hand there is potential upside such as software being put through some additional review and smaller developers being able to benefit from economies of scale. On the other hand there is potential downside such as concentration of information, increased control over the software landscape by dominant players, and middle man driven cost increases. Compartmentalization, heterogeneous solutions, and separate mechanisms are important concepts to security/privacy and reliability.

In this case it sounds as though there will still be a means of "going outside the official store", but we just don't know how far these players really intend to take things.

 

As long as they don't filter extensions based on content and only based on whether it's suspicious I'm fine with it.

Based on Android the content shouldn't be an issue.

 

This is just great... Now, I can't even install extensions/scripts offline. If I make my own script, I can't even use it? WTF?

-edit-

I mean, I really can't. In this case, I did not create one, but tried to install one I downloaded sometime ago, which prevents Google tracking, and I couldn't install any script/extension. This is stupid. I'll have to see if it can be overridden.

-edit 2-

It's possible to still install them, by first opening chrome://extensions/ and then drag & drop them.