For my report on extension performance I first needed a list of Chrome extensions. This post takes a deeper look at the full list, looking at the most popular extensions, extension ratings, paid extensions, and top extension authors.
I also put the full list Chrome extensions I found on GitHub.
How many Chrome extensions are there?
I found 137,345 Chrome extensions and 39,263 themes – 176,608 items in total.
This result broadly matches those by Extension Monitor from August 2019 where they found 188,620 items. Note that their analysis also included Chrome Apps, which Google has since announced they are ending support for.
Some extensions will be missing from my list, for example, not all Chrome extensions are listed publicly. In general, please view the numbers in this blog post as rough estimates based on the available data. Not all extensions are available in all countries. The numbers below refer only to extensions, not themes.
Also, keep in mind that extension publishers have incentices to game install counts and ratings.
What are the most popular Chrome extensions?
This table shows the 20 most popular Chrome extensions. 17 of them have been installed more than 10 million times.
| Extension | Category | Installs |
|---|---|---|
| Google Translate | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Google Hangouts | Social & Communication | 10M+ |
| Netflix Party | Fun | 10M+ |
| Tampermonkey | Productivity | 10M+ |
| AdBlock — best ad blocker | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Adblock Plus - free ad blocker | Productivity | 10M+ |
| uBlock Origin | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Adobe Acrobat | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Chrome Remote Desktop | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Pinterest Save button | Productivity | 10M+ |
| LastPass: Free Password Manager | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Avast SafePrice | Comparison, deals, coupons | Shopping | 10M+ |
| Avast Online Security | Social & Communication | 10M+ |
| Skype | Social & Communication | 10M+ |
| Cisco Webex Extension | Social & Communication | 10M+ |
| Grammarly for Chrome | Productivity | 10M+ |
| Honey | Shopping | 10M+ |
| AVG SafePrice | Comparison, deals, coupons | Shopping | 9M+ |
| Screencastify - Screen Video Recorder | Productivity | 8M+ |
| Hola Free VPN, unblock any site! | Productivity | 8M+ |
Next, lets look at developer tools.
| Extension | Category | Installs |
|---|---|---|
| TouchEn PC보안 확장 | Developer Tools | 5M+ |
| Full Page Screen Capture | Developer Tools | 4M+ |
| EditThisCookie | Developer Tools | 2M+ |
| CryptoPro Extension for CAdES | Developer Tools | 2M+ |
| React Developer Tools | Developer Tools | 2M+ |
| ColorZilla | Developer Tools | 2M+ |
| Tag Assistant (by Google) | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| User-Agent Switcher for Chrome | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| JSON Formatter | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Proxy SwitchySharp | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| JSONView | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Web Developer Toolbar | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Web Developer | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Proxy SwitchyOmega | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Wappalyzer | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Vue.js devtools | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Facebook Pixel Helper | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| WhatFont | Developer Tools | 1M+ |
| Redux DevTools | Developer Tools | 900k+ |
| ColorPick Eyedropper | Developer Tools | 900k+ |
TouchEn PC isn't really a developer tool, but an extensions required by some Korean banks and other institutions. CryptoPro is similar, a review mentions "tax inspection" making them use it.
Install counts
70% of Chrome extensions have fewer than 100 users, but together they only make up less than 0.1% of installs.
The median install count is 17, on average each extension has 12,304 users.
In total I'm counting a minimum of 1.69 billion installs. The real number is higher, since the Chrome Web Store doesn't provide precise numbers. Especially in the "1M+" bucket a lot of installs aren't counted since the displayed install count is capped at "10M+"
Ratings
Here I'm only including extensions with at least 10 ratings. The median overall rating is 4.4, the average is 4.1.
The median rating doesn't vary much by category, it's a bit over 4 but almost 5 for the Photos category.
The ratio of installs to ratings is about 140, so 1000 installs will result in 7 ratings. I'm fairly uncertain about the accuracy of this, especially since Chrome doesn't report precise install counts.
Free vs Paid
4.7% of extensions support some kind of payment, mostly as a one-off purchase rather than as a subscription.
In most categories 1-3% of extensions are paid. The Fun category is a clear outlier here, with 15% paid extensions.
Pricing
89% of one-off prices are $0.99.
The most expensive extensions tend to be Chinese, with a $500 Tmall store tool topping the list.
Looking only at English-language extensions, someone is trying to sell a snake game for $299. The most expensive extension with actual users is SquarespaceWebsites Tools PRO, which costs $199 and reports 358 installs.
Outside the Fun category extension prices tend to be higher than $0.99.
I've excluded the News & Weather category here, where the median price is $110. It contains a bunch of extensions like "Weather Meter" and "Climate of Antarctica" with no information about what the extension does. The description is copied from Wikipedia, and the extension image is a generic weather-related landscape picture.
Monthly subscriptions
The median subscription price is $4.99/mo, with an average of $8.35/mo.
What Chrome extension makes the most money?
This is hard to answer:
- Do free trials count towards the user count?
- How long do monthly and annual subscribers stick around?
- Prices vary by country
- There's no data about in-app purchases
- Some users will be test accounts that aren't paying anything
But anyway, here's a table showing the top extensions based on made-up revenue figure. I multiplied the one-off price or per-year subscription cost by the number of installs.
Please don't take these figures too seriously! They may well be off by an order of magnitude.
| Extension | Price | Installs | Super Wrong Revenue Figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beebs - Watch iPlayer, ITV & C4 Abroad | $44.99/yr | 30k+ | $1.35M |
| Simple Posher | $9.99/mo | 6k+ | $719k |
| Relay Auto-Refresher | $49.99/mo | 1k+ | $600k |
| Social Lead Machine | $39.99/mo | 1k+ | $480k |
| Shopping researcher | $39.99/mo | 977 | $469k |
| Speech Recognition Anywhere | $39.99 | 10k+ | $400k |
| AMZ Review to Order Matching | $29.99/mo | 1k+ | $360k |
| Leads Extractor | $29.99/mo | 1k+ | $360k |
| Twitter Follower | $34.99/yr | 10k+ | $350k |
| Relay Auto Booker | $49.99/mo | 419 | $251k |
| ZTrade | $97.00/mo | 213 | $248k |
| KW Index Checker | $39.99 | 6k+ | $240k |
| Saturation Inspector | $19.99/mo | 1k+ | $240k |
| Shortkeys | $2.99 | 80k+ | $239k |
| PixivDownloader EX | $1.99/mo | 10k+ | $239k |
| Website AdBlocker+ | $99.99 | 2k+ | $200k |
| DS Amazon Quick View Extended | $19.99 | 10k+ | $200k |
| What is my IP address? | $1.99/mo | 7k+ | $167k |
| Linkedroid | $29.99/mo | 450 | $162k |
| StubTabs | $49.99/mo | 254 | $152k |
| Site Geo IP Locator | $1.99/mo | 6k+ | $143k |
To further discredit the numbers here, two of the supposedly top earning extensions are no longer in the Chrome Web Store. Open SEO Stats supposedly had 100k users, at a price of $3.99/mo. Another extension, SpeechNotesX, would also have been listed with a revenue of $791k. The original extension doesn't exist any more, but now there's a SpeechNotes extension for $5.99/mo with 2000 users.
Also, the price for Social Lead Machine varies from $0.72/mo in the UK to $41.83 in Ireland. Using the method above, that means revenue could be between $8k and $502k a year.
Authors
71,557 different authors have published Chrome extensions. The top 24 have published 5% of all extensions.
Here are the top authors by the number of published extensions. Many of their extensions only change the New Tab page.
| Author | Top Extension | #Extensions | #Installs |
|---|---|---|---|
| lovelytab.com | Fortnite Season 6 Wallpapers HD New Tab (6k+ installs) | 1189 | 208.6k |
| choosetab.com | Dragon Ball Z Kai New Tab (2M+ installs) | 893 | 42.2M |
| Chrome HD Themes | Anime New Tab, Customized Wallpapers HD (1k+ installs) | 586 | 8.4k |
| Megathemes | Stranger Things Season 3 Wallpapers New Tab (2k+ installs) | 512 | 16.8k |
| Super Tab | Peppa Pig HQ Wallpapers New Tab (2k+ installs) | 390 | 14.5k |
| www.newtabs.pro | New Tab - Billie Eilish (50k+ installs) | 355 | 13.9M |
| www.newtab.fun | New Tab - Sonic the Hedgehog (50k+ installs) | 320 | 7.7M |
| New Tab Gallery | Black Red Shards Wallpaper New Tab Theme (2k+ installs) | 275 | 13.3k |
| Supertab | Money Heist Wallpapers and New Tab (429 installs) | 256 | 7.3k |
| Wallpaper Addons | Wheel Of Fortune Casino (569 installs) | 235 | 8.1k |
And here are the top authors by total number of installs.
| Author | Top Extension | #Extensions | #Installs |
|---|---|---|---|
| chromenewtab.com | Zombie Tsunami New Tab Theme (1M+ installs) | 126 | 63.4M |
| choosetab.com | Dragon Ball Z Kai New Tab (2M+ installs) | 893 | 42.2M |
| Wallpaper Time | Super Mario Run New Tab Theme (900k+ installs) | 47 | 29.3M |
| Wallpaper New Tab | Spiderman HD New Tab Theme (1M+ installs) | 31 | 25.7M |
| Chromenewtab.com | Roblox New Tab & Wallpapers Collection (1M+ installs) | 40 | 23.6M |
| Avast Software | Avast SafePrice | Comparison, deals, coupons (10M+ installs) | 2 | 20M |
| New Tab Pro | Fortnite New Tab (1M+ installs) | 19 | 19M |
| Mindspark Interactive Network, Inc. | PDF Viewer & Converter by ProPDFConverter (2M+ installs) | 66 | 17.5M |
| H Covers Media | Overwatch New Tab & Wallpapers Collection (1M+ installs) | 37 | 14.7M |
| www.newtabs.pro | New Tab - Billie Eilish (50k+ installs) | 355 | 13.9M |
Keep in mind that doesn't publish exact install figures, and extensions with more than 10 million users are reported as 10M+. Presumably there are some extensions with 20 million users and more.
Directory size
This measures how much disk space the extension code uses – excluding extension data. I only have this data for roughly the top 1000 extensions.
In most cases the folder takes up less than 30MB, but in the case of ClaroRead it goes up to 130MB.
Permissions
Extensions have a manifest that defines what permissions are required. For example, the tabs permission allows an extension to see what tabs are currently open.
Again I only have data on the most popular extensions. I excluded extensions that only change the New Tab background – this biases the sample, since these simple extensions presumably need fewer permissions.
I also counted URL permissions like https://*/* as <all_urls>.
Removed extensions
I originally collected this data in May 2020, but noticed that some extensions have since been removed or saw a big drop in install counts.
Out of 17414 extensions with at least 1000 installs and at least one rating, 921 (5.3%) are now no longer available. 79 (0.5%) now have less than a tenth of their install count a month ago.
What's causing this? I think in part publishers are gaming the number of installs. For example, I found two extensions with the same code that have now been removed. One had its install count drop from 2M to 20k. The other was less than a week old, had 1M installs, and no ratings. I'm not sure what the goal was here – maybe get a lot of users and then upload a new version of the extension that's malware?
That said, extensions being removed is not always due to fraud. Publishers may remove extensions just because they don't support them any more. The Chrome Web Store also recently deleted one of my extension that I hadn't updated for a while, presumably because it stopped working.
I made a list of 137k Chrome extension and collected some stats. I also put the full list on GitHub (link in the post). 1/6
— DebugBear (@DebugBear) June 30, 2020
➡️ https://t.co/0v0joaLxmd pic.twitter.com/U39QYxAtjz