Chrome Web Store

CWS was publicly unveiled in December 2010,[2] and was opened on February 11, 2011, with the release of Google Chrome 9.0.[3] A year later it was redesigned to "catalyze a big increase in traffic, across downloads, users, and total number of apps".[4] As of June 2012, there were 750 million total installs of content hosted on CWS.[5]

Some extension developers have sold their extensions to third-parties who then incorporated adware.[6][7] In 2014, Google removed two such extensions from CWS after many users complained about unwanted pop-up ads.[8] The following year, Google acknowledged that about five percent of visits to its own websites had been altered by extensions with adware.[9][10][11]

Malware remains a problem on CWS.[12][13][14][15] In January 2018, security researchers found four malicious extensions with more than 500,000 combined downloads.[12][16]

Chrome used to allow extensions hosted on CWS to also be installed at the developer's website for the sake of convenience.[17] But this became a malware vector, so it was removed in 2018.[18]

• Official website