Google has played a role in allowing cryptocurrency mining to flourish by supporting relevant extensions in its Chrome browser. But today, citing lack of “single purpose” and developers who inadequately informed users about mining behavior, Google is severing support by banning crypto-mining extensions in its Chrome Web Store.
A Chromium blog post explains the reason for the new policy.
“As the extensions ecosystem continues to evolve, we remain focused on empowering developers to build innovative experiences while keeping our users as safe as possible. Over the past few months, there has been a rise in malicious extensions that appear to provide useful functionality on the surface, while embedding hidden cryptocurrency mining scripts that run in the background without the user’s consent. These mining scripts often consume significant CPU resources, and can severely impact system performance and power consumption.”
Google will no longer list new mining extensions and will delist all existing mining extensions by late June.
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