Google has made it a little more difficult for third-party applications to forcefully install their extensions onto Chrome.
It is quite common for applications to bundle one or the other toolbar with its setup such that you could have half your screen taken over by toolbars if you aren’t careful. With Google Chrome growing increasingly popular it is not uncommon to find applications bundling Chrome extension with them as they did for Firefox add-ons and IE toolbars.
Till now Chrome allowed adding extensions to it via the registry such that other applications could install an extension to Chrome to integrate with it better. However, with Chrome 25 such methods will be disabled by default.
Extensions will now need explicit approval from users before being installed. If a third party application installs an extension, it will no longer be automatically activated, instead the user will get an indication that there is an extension that was installed externally, and the user will have the option to enable the extension on remove it.
When users upgrade from previous versions of Chrome to Chrome 25, all external extensions will be disabled automatically, users see a one-time prompt and will be asked to explicitly enable the extensions they want.
Add-ons and extensions can have a huge impact on the performance of browsers, and often the add-ons installed by third party applications are the culprit. Mozilla took similar measures back with the release of Firefox 8, where externally installed add-ons were disabled by default. Any add-ons not explicitly installed by a user now show an explicit prompt asking the user to opt in to the installation.
Google had also earlier made the process of adding non-Chrome-Store extensions a little more explicit by requiring users to drag and drop the extension file onto the extensions page in Chrome.
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