Google Bans Chrome Extensions That Mine Cryptocurrencies From the Web Store

From Bleeping Computer

Google announced that effective today, the Chrome Web Store review staff would stop accepting new extensions on the Web Store that perform cryptocurrency mining operations.
Existing Chrome extensions that perform cryptocurrency mining will be delisted sometime in late June.

Google has allowed mining extensions under certain terms
Until today, Google allowed extensions to mine cryptocurrencies only if cryptocurrency mining was the extension's sole purpose, and the user was informed in advance that his/her computer's resources were going to be used for these types of hardware-intensive tasks.

"Unfortunately, approximately 90% of all extensions with mining scripts that developers have attempted to upload to Chrome Web Store have failed to comply with these policies," James Wagner, Extensions Platform Product Manager for Google said today.

Wagner is referring to the trend of Chrome extensions that are now hiding mining scripts in a background process, and utilizing users' resources without their knowledge or consent.

This type of hidden in-browser mining, named cryptojacking, has become the favorite method of monetizing extension userbases by many developers. Bleeping Computer has reported on many such incidents in the past[1, 2, 3], and not even Firefox is safe from such malicious add-ons.

Yeesh silicon valley is not having any of this crypto. That will be to their detriment. They are just opening up space for a new competitor to service the space.