Hi David-
Assuming none of the above helps, you can notify your users of the options they have for running extensions not hosted in the webstore:
-Use any verison of chrome on mac or linux, where we are not enforcing these restrictions
-On Windows, install the
canary channel alongside the existing stable/beta install (since canary can co-exist and uses a different profile directory), or replace chrome stable/beta with the
dev channel.
-Users who are very technical could even
build their own copy of chromium from the open source repository, or download one of the
continuous builds). This isn't a good option in general since you don't get autoupdates and would need to keep it up to date yourself, but I include it for completeness.
We don't recommend trying to have people run the extension unpacked in developer mode, because we will be adding UI safeguards to steer regular users away from this, and if we find abuse by some of the same bad actors who have been force installing extensions to date we may need to start flagging extensions that push developer mode on users as malware.