Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google’s full launch.
“Once an extension is uploaded, our gallery takes care of packaging and signing,” says Google software engineer Lei Zheng. “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.”
Google provides the following tips for uploading extensions:
– Upload a ZIP file of your extension directory, not a packaged CRX file.
– Include a well-designed product icon in your manifest (more info).
– After uploading your extension, you will need to provide a detailed description, as well as screenshots or a YouTube video of your extension in action.
The review process is fully automated in most cases. Google will manually review ones that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect “file://” URLs. Developers will have to give Google additional information for these types of extensions, for security reasons.
Information about how to write extensions for Chrome can be found here. Google says all types of extensions are welcome, as long as they comply with their terms of service.
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