Google will remove thousands of Chrome extensions. And this is good

The new rules will allow Google to conduct a large cleaning in the store, removing useless spammer and malicious extensions, as well as extra clones and duplicates.

Developers are forbidden to artificially inflate the rating, the number of reviews, or installations by any “illegal” methods, including paid cheat services. You cannot publish copies, duplicates, or clones of your extensions under different names. It is also forbidden to overload extension service information to include it in a large number of categories and improve search results. Incorrect service information cannot be specified.

In addition, the store is no longer allowed to publish extensions with a single task, for example, just launch a web page or application. Extensions that overload the browser with alerts and reminders are also prohibited.

According to a rough estimate, thousands of “junk” extensions that were useless or even harmful to users could be removed from the store. At the moment, the range of Chrome Web Store has more than 200 thousand extensions.

Developers can still manage to resolve the shortcomings of their extensions, since the rules will only take effect on August 27, 2020.