So a few people complaining about Chromes policy regarding extensions, as opposed to what Firefox used to do and it’s impact on security.
Note Firefox now follows Chromes model.
At least according to Wikipedia, Chrome had 123,000 extensions in 2022.
I think there was a time it was possible to review them by hand but even if a company was up for that it’s not just one verification, every update has to be verified.
Extensions can also pass perfect verification without it meaning anything for safety. An on-page translation or coupon extension that uses the cloud is a good example, if it uses a cloud API that’s in control of the author it can be made malicious on the cloud-side without changing the extension and that can be tough to confirm because it can be set up to only affect certain IPs at certain times.
Note Firefox now follows Chromes model.
Does it? Certainly, on Android it is not as easy to install add-ons which are not tested on Android. I don’t use Chrome on Android or the desktop really so I can’t say I am an authority about it.