Announcement: New extension badges coming to Chrome Web Store

[Stefan vd]

Dear Developer,

Since 2009, developers have been hard at work building extensions that make Chrome more powerful, useful, and personalized for users. The Chrome Web Store aims to make it easy for users to find top quality extensions while recognizing the developers who create them. Today, we're happy to announce two new extension badges to help us deliver on that goal: the Featured badge and the Established publisher badge. Both of these badges will appear in the store in the next few weeks.

Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering, and may also see their extensions appear in special promotions both on and off Chrome Web Store. Learn more about the new badges below.

Featured badge

The Featured badge will be granted to extensions that follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design. Featured badges will be assigned to qualifying extensions through our extension review system. Chrome staff will manually evaluate each extension before it receives the badge, paying special attention to the following:

1. Adherence to Chrome Web Store's best practices guidelines, including providing a delightful and intuitive experience, using the latest platform APIs, and respecting the privacy of end-users.
2. A store listing page that is clear and helpful to prospective users, with quality images and a detailed description.

Established Publisher badge

The new Established Publisher badge will showcase developers who have verified their identity and demonstrated compliance with the developer program policies. This badge will be granted automatically to publishers who meet the following two conditions:

1. The publisher's identity has been verified.
2. The publisher has established a consistent positive track record with Google services and compliance with the Developer Program Policy.

Any extensions built by a developer who follows the Chrome Web Store Developer Program Policies and does not have any unresolved violations will be considered. For new developers, it will take at least a few months of respecting these conditions to qualify. Today, this represents nearly 75% of all extensions in the Chrome Web Store and we expect this number to keep growing.

What you need to do

There is no mandatory action, but we recommend that developers review their extension(s) over the next few weeks to ensure they're in line with our best practices guidelines.

Note that developers cannot pay to receive either badge, but we aim to provide them with other ways to request consideration. Starting on April 20, 2022 the One Stop Support page will begin trialing an option that allows developers to nominate extensions for the Featured badge. Additional details will be available in the Discovery on the Chrome Web Store documentation.

We are excited to recognize extension excellence on the Chrome Web Store through these new badges. Thank you for your participation in the Chrome extension ecosystem!

- The Google Chrome Web Store team

Source: Chrome Web Store Developer newsletter

Thanks,
Stefan vd

[Stefan Van Damme]

Hi Jason,

 however I'm unable to migrate them to manifest v3 until audio can be played in service workers.

I do understand this huge issue. If I was on the Chrome team, I would have to extend the lifetime of the manifest v2 Chrome extension until those features are ready in manifest v3. And that all manifest v3 bugs have been fixed.

In my own Chrome extension, Turn Off the Lights, I do have the same issue. That I can not play or even use the Audio/Video element in the background. However, there is an API proposal to solve this issue according to the W3 Extension group:

Proposal: Offscreen Documents for Manifest V3 #170

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/170

Thanks,

Stefan vd

On Sun, Apr 10, 2022 at 4:57 PM Jason Savard <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

I like the badge initiative.

I'm just concerned because I consider my extensions to be high quality, however I'm unable to migrate them to manifest v3 until audio can be played in service workers.

I hope this is taken into consideration because if I migrated them they would lose their high quality with patchy workarounds for playing audio.

Jason

[Jason Savard]

I like the badge initiative.

I'm just concerned because I consider my extensions to be high quality, however I'm unable to migrate them to manifest v3 until audio can be played in service workers.

I hope this is taken into consideration because if I migrated them they would lose their high quality with patchy workarounds for playing audio.

Jason

On Saturday, April 9, 2022 at 10:47:10 a.m. UTC-4 Stefan vd wrote:

[Stefan vd]

Hi everyone,

The official blog post is online at https://blog.google/products/chrome/find-great-extensions-new-chrome-web-store-badges/

Thanks,
Stefan vd

[hrg...@gmail.com]

So far I've seen many MV2 extensions with the Featured badge.

This looks quite arbitrary given that one of the guidelines for getting the badge is "Quality extensions should use Manifest V3".

Once again, the CWS rules are mere suggestions that may or may not be enforced according to the current alignment of celestial bodies.

[Simeon Vincent]

Adopting Manifest V3 is a "best practice," but it is not a hard requirement for the featured badge. The framing we used here intentionally avoids terms like "rules" or "requirements" for that reason. Instead, we wanted to communicate that there are several factors that we take into consideration. 

That being said, what I'm hearing is that you'd like to see an objective set of criteria that a developer can follow in order to qualify for the feature badge. Is that correct, Hr?

Simeon - @dotproto

Chrome Extensions DevRel

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[hrg...@gmail.com]

I would not ask for objectivity because that's not possible when the guidelines use terms like:

• handles user data appropriately
  
• the extension functions at an outstanding level
  
• should provide a good-looking, intuitive, and seamless user experience   
  

Those are all highly subjective terms.

What I'd like to see is a clear list of those subjective requirements that must be complied with. But what we have instead is an arbitrary set of suggestions that may or may not be required.

ARBITRARINESS. This is the big problem with the CWS in general, not just the guidelines for badges.

It's not about objectivity vs. subjectivity because quality is always subjective. So, it's understandable that they ask for subjective requirements.

However, at the very least there should be a clear criterion, so that when something is denied to a developer, we could know what specific requirement we are not complying with.

Instead, it looks like the CWS staff makes decisions by throwing the dice.

[Cuyler Stuwe]

I interpret the “featured” program roughly as “extensions where Google benefits more from the showcasing than the extension developer does”.

It’s not really about you as a dev; From Google’s perspective, it’s more like “look at all of the cool things Chrome can do, so please keep using our browser forever”.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/db96475e-3a5d-4ece-84ff-26fea9ee4852n%40chromium.org.

[Cuyler Stuwe]

In that sense, I see the “featured” badge as similar to Upwork’s “top 1% expert-vetted” badge — In order to earn it, I needed to demonstrate that I didn’t need it.

[Breeze]

TIL: an extension with "Featured badge" can still be malicious. It doesn't seem like a featured badge warrants manual review on every updates, because that extension had an obfuscated content script(!) which is clearly prohibited by CWS policy. I pressed the "Report Abuse" button without expecting much. To my surprise, they swiftly removed the featured badge, but the item is still live on CWS.