Dear Developer,
Since 2012, we have enabled extension developers to provide a smooth installation experience on their own pages with inline installation. We have also worked hard to prevent abuse of this feature by disabling inline installation in the case of deceptive or confusing installation flows. Today, we're announcing an update to these abuse protections.
In August 2015, we announced an enforcement scheme for extensions that are distributed by deceptive or confusing ads and inline installation pages. In a few weeks, we will upgrade our automated inline installation abuse detection to improve our detection speed and better detect extensions using deceptive or confusing installation flows. We are also expanding enforcement to cover any association with deceptive practices, including deceptive ads and landing pages, or installation patterns that suggest user confusion.
In addition to the existing extension-level protection, our expanded enforcement will also use machine learning to evaluate each inline installation request for signals of deceptive, confusing, or malicious ads or webpages. When we find those signals, we'll selectively disable that one inline installation request and redirect the user to the extension's page on the Chrome Web Store. This selective enforcement will not impact inline installation of that extension from other, non-deceptive sources. Developers will not be notified of this enforcement, as it happens on an as-needed basis.
You can read more about enforcement of inline installation policies in our Enforcement FAQ, including how inline pages are re-enabled after being disabled by our automated enforcement system.
If your extension does not use inline installation, you will not be impacted by these enforcement changes. Developers of extensions with inline installation disabled for all extension inline installation requests will receive an email alert from the Web Store with more information.
Sincerely,
The Chrome Web Store Team
