Chromium Blog: Extensions: One Step Closer to the Finish Line

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

Extensions: One Step Closer to the Finish Line

Monday, November 23, 2009

During the last few months, our team has been working hard to support extensions in Google Chrome's beta channel. Today, we are getting one step closer to this goal; developers can now upload their extensions to Google Chrome's extension gallery. We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch.
You can find all the info to write an extension in our docs. Once your extension is ready for the gallery, you'll need to upload a zip file of your code and an icon that helps users distinguish your extension. You'll also have the option to submit text, screenshots and/or YouTube videos that describe the functionality of your extension. All types of extensions are welcome in the gallery, provided they comply with our Terms of Service.
For most extensions, the review process is fully automated. The only extensions we'll review manually are those that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect "file://" URLs. For security reasons, developers of these types of extensions will need to provide some additional information before they can post them in the gallery.
Once an extension is uploaded, our gallery takes care of packaging and signing. Updating an extension is also incredibly easy — all a developer needs to do is to upload a new file in the gallery. Finally, to further help developers, in the next few days, we plan to open up the gallery to a small group of trusted testers. They will provide developers with insights and bug reports that will help them polish their extensions ahead of our beta launch.
We can't wait to share all the great extensions that you'll submit with all of Google Chrome's users. In the meantime, we encourage you to submit any bugs you find in the upload process to our Issue Tracker and to ask all relevant questions in our discussion group.
Posted by Lei Zheng, Software Engineer