GOOGLE CHROME PROHIBITS EXTENSIONS TO MINING CRYPTOCURRENCIES

Google Chrome, one of the most widely used Internet browsers today, has recently made the announcement that it will no longer accept that any application related to cryptocurrency mining be loaded as an extension, in order to combat the use of web miners.

Considering them as "hidden risks", the team behind the Google Chrome browser decided this week to prohibit any browser extension related to cryptocurrency mining from being loaded into the Chrome Web Store (application store and search engine extensions). In the same way, the extensions that already exist in this virtual store and carry out the mining of cryptocurrencies will be eliminated next June.

This information was disclosed through a publication on his blog, in which it can be read that the rest of the applications related to distributed accounting technology may remain available to users:

Starting today, the Chrome Web Store will no longer accept extensions that mine cryptocurrencies. Existing extensions that mine cryptocurrencies will be removed from the Chrome Web Store at the end of June. The extensions with purposes related to blockchain, that are not mining, will continue allowed in the Web Store.

James Wagner
Product Manager of the Extensions Platform, Google Chrome

This has been the consequence of what the team behind Chrome considers as a constant violation of its use policies, which established that any application of cryptocurrency mining could be loaded in the store, provided that this was their sole purpose and each user was informed of it. However, according to the figures provided by the aforementioned statement, 90% of the applications related to mining that had been attempted to load your store did not meet these requirements. So they could seek to take advantage of the processing power of their users' devices.

The latter is the essence of all the controversy behind the acceptance of web miners as an alternative to, for example, advertising on web pages. The reason is that no user agrees that their device is used for profit without their consent, as has happened with pornographic sites and even with advertisements of the second most visited site on the network, YouTube.

Using a graph, the publication illustrated how web miners are applications that overload work on each computer. This overload could affect the useful life of each of the users' devices, since they are not conditioned to work in this way.

Another popular browser, Opera, has taken less drastic measures than Chrome in the past and has developed applications against web miners, which are useful even to protect smartphones from this type of software.