I am displeased by this change. Although the Firefox version of my extension is more work to develop, I will be pouring most of my resources into that in the future.
I currently have a product that uses a Chrome extension to work. I am privately beta'ing it out by hosting it on my own website.
Because I don't want to be killed with negative reviews of my unpolished first version in the Chrome store.
Now I am forced to show my work and suffer brickbats in public even before I finish it. WTF.
Second
=======
And post-Snowden, the Chrome web store publication process is LESS secure for my users than me hosting the app myself. In the Chrome store, you send Google your raw source (possibly minimized) files. They will sign it and push a blob to the end user. https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/docs/publish
AFAIK, there is no way for the end user to have any assurance that the file being pushed by Google was the file that the developer intended to push.
With a privately-served version, the equivalent of a secret key created by the developer needs to be compromised to push updates.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken about this.