Such an offer would tempt most of us. But in pocketing the money, and transferring ownership to another party, Amit also sold the trust of the 30,000+ users who had chosen to install it. “It was a 4-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal,” explains Amit on his blog. The developer of the ‘Add to Feedly’ extension, Amit Agarwal, says that he was approached out of the blue by a (mysterious, un-Googleable) individual wanting to buy his add-on. This is precisely what happened to one of Chrome’s most popular* third-party Feedly extensions.
In what sounds like the paranoid conspiracy theory of an anti-Google shill, some popular Chrome extensions are reportedly being bought up by pedlars of malware looking for a fast way to infect thousands of users at once. But what happens when add-ons are sold to a new owner? Millions of Chrome users place their trust in the hands of extension developers.
