Google Chrome, the most widely used desktop browser with an impressive 66% market share, boasts a user base of 1.6 billion active users. The number of extensions that it hosts is equally impressive: over 125,000 are listed on its Chrome Web Store (CWS). However, the immense popularity of the browser, and, as a result, its extensions, has a darker, dreary side. According to a
research conducted by Stanford University, it looks like the Big G’s hands are so full that it hardly has any control over its sprawling extension empire.
The researchers found that despite rigorous checks that Google supposedly performs on each extension using a combination of machine-learning and human review, it falls spectacularly short of the goal — ensuring that the extensions are safe to use.
According to the report, the scale of risk posed by potentially harmful and
outright dangerous extensions, which the researchers call “Security-Noteworthy Extensions” or SNE, is simply hair-raising. Over the past three years, more than 346 million users have installed at least one SNE, the research says. Among these installations, 280 million users downloaded malware-containing extensions, 63.3 million installed extensions that violated CWS policies, and 2.9 million users installed extensions known to have vulnerabilities.
