I don't know why you're claiming this wasn't developed openly. The bugs are all public (the first was filed ~2 years ago); the code is checked into the public tree and has been enabled on canary for almost a month. It wasn't a heavy-handed or rash change, and the impact on both users and developers is minimal.
I'm sorry. This is NOT a meaningful channel. And this is NOT appropriate communication. But to be honest, what I find most scary about this is the fact that you think it is.
So you're saying you didn't look under the locked filing cabinet in the basement of the condemned warehouse, the one that they were storing in the closet that used to be the men's room until it flooded. I see. How is that Google's fault?
For those of us that have already-deployed off-store extensions in the wild, what options do we have for migrating our users to the new, Webstore-powered versions? Or will their extensions just silently stop updating (or, worse, working altogether)? If it's the latter, your claim that this change will have minimal impact on developers and users is patently false, since you'll be breaking currently-released and -deployed applications that used to work and met the previously-documented requirements, with no warning whatsoever. Further, the suggestion that this is justified because it was committed to a public repository is absurd: are all developers of Chrome applications supposed to follow every single commit to Chromium's repo to ensure that our extensions won't break? What happened to Chrome's supposed immunity to breaking extensions with new releases, which you claimed made your extension model superior to Firefox's?
This change adds a few extra steps for an off-store install, unless the user or administrator configures things otherwise. That's it; updates and existing installations aren't affected at all. The details are very clear if you read the discussion or a few of the comments in the bug.
