It’s important for users to know what extensions they have enabled since extensions can sometimes influence Chrome’s functionality and performance. Many users have installed extensions from the Chrome Web Store, but some users have extensions that were silently installed without their knowledge.

Until now, it has been possible to silently install extensions into Chrome on Windows using the Windows registry mechanism for extension deployment. This feature was originally intended to allow users to opt-in to adding a useful extension to Chrome as a part of the installation of another application. Unfortunately, this feature has been widely abused by third parties to silently install extensions into Chrome without proper acknowledgment from users.

Two new features in Chrome 25 will help users run only the extensions they want to use:

Extensions installed by third party programs using external extension deployment options will be disabled by default. When a third party program installs an extension, the Chrome menu will be badged, and users can click through the Chrome menu to see a dialog containing an option to enable the extension or to remove it from their computer.

In addition, all extensions previously installed using external deployment options will be automatically disabled. Chrome will show a one-time prompt to allow the re-enabling of any of the extensions.

Windows application developers should ask users to install Chrome extensions from within Chrome. A great way to allow users to install a Chrome extension related to your Windows application is to link users to your website and use inline installation.

If you have questions, please get in touch with us on the Chromium extensions group.

Posted by Peter Ludwig, Product Manager

Built on Web Components, and inspired by Model Driven Views, Dart's Web UI library is now ready for testing. This early release of Web UI supports dynamic templates, live one-way and two-way data binding, and custom DOM elements. Web UI also includes a compiler that makes these features available to all modern browsers today.

Web UI helps you build declarative apps that have cleaner semantics and structure. You can build and use custom elements like <x-survey> that encapsulate their style, behavior, and structure to hide implementation details like deeply nested HTML tags. Just like HTML tags, these new tags (aka custom elements) can be nested, extended, and shared with other developers.

Web UI also automatically keeps the HTML page and data models in sync with one-way and two-way data binding. Simply declare, in the DOM itself, the bindings between Dart objects and page elements and let Web UI take care of the details.

Here is a small snippet from a simple TODO app that shows some of these features, including:

(1) linking to a custom element
(2) declarative event handling
(3) templates and iteration
(4) data binding with a custom element

To see Dart Web UI in action, we've ported the ubiquitous TodoMVC sample app:

Getting started and installing Web UI is easy with pub, the Dart package manager. Simply add the web_ui package to your list of dependencies and run pub install. Once installed, you can even configure Dart Editor to watch for changes and automatically recompile your Web UI apps for quick and easy edit and reload development cycles.

To learn more about Dart's Web UI package, you can read the docs and browse the summary of features. There's more work to do, and we look forward to your comments on our mailing list.

Posted by Siggi Cherem, Software Engineer

Since we launched Chrome, the team has continued to work on ways to make it fast and simple for people to use. To that end, we’re going to begin testing variations of Chrome’s New Tab page (NTP) in which a user’s default search provider will be able to add a search box or otherwise customize the NTP. While you can search straight from the omnibox in Chrome, we’ve found that many people still navigate to their search engine's home page to initiate a search instead. The goal is to save people time by helping them search and navigate the web faster.

We’ll also allow search engines to display the user’s search terms right in the omnibox, which avoids the need for a second search box on the results page. This new capability, along with other ways to improve search suggestions, are exposed in a new Embedded Search API, an extension of the existing SearchBox API. Search engines can implement any part of the specification if they’d like their users to experience a customized variation of the NTP experience.

Starting today, a small set of users on Dev channel on Windows and Chrome OS, who have Google selected as their search provider, will begin seeing variations of the new experience. Mac will be coming soon. We look forward to your feedback and bug reports, which you can file against the InstantExtended feature on crbug.com.

Posted by David Holloway, Software Engineer