Chrome’s secretly installed extensions

Luca found a hidden Chrome extension that is installed by default in Chrome and most Chromium derivatives. Surma and Jake dig into what this extensions does and how reasonable it is to get angry about it.

Resources:

• Luca’s original tweet thread
• The extension’s source code
• Discussion on blink-dev
• The original PR that introduced the extension
• Brendan Eich’s response
• Brave PR disabling the extension