Extensions are one of the best inventions that browsers have received in recent years, although the guys at Microsoft they didn't realize until it was too late and Chrome had eaten his toast. Although it is true that Chrome was not the first browser to introduce this type of add-ons in browsers, it is the one who has always made the most of it.
And I say that he has made the most of it, because today has more than 60% market share, Thanks in part to the good operation it offers us, the integration with Gmail and the rest of Google services and also, because it is the browser that makes more extensions available to us to personalize the way we browse the Internet.
To this day, if we want install an extension in Google Chrome, we can do it freely directly from the Chrome Web Store or from outside of it, through repositories that some developers make available to us in GitHub, recently purchased by Microsoft. Google wants users who use its browser to be protected at all times and, incidentally, to prevent third-party applications that are responsible for installing malicious extensions on our computer from sneaking an extension into the browser.
This change will arrive before the end of the year, when version number 71 of Google Chrome is released. From that moment, if we want to install an extension from outside the Chrome store, it will open the extension store directly, where the extension should be found. If not, we have no choice but to look for a valid alternative that performs the same functions as the one we intended to install, and we will surely find it.
It is also likely that a developer, or Google itself, allow us to disable this limitation, but we will not know until the final version of Google Chrome 71 is released, for which there is still a little less than 6 months to go.