In their latest move declaring war against malware (and clean up their image), Google announced today that they have begun blocking 3rd party Chrome extensions downloaded outside their sanctioned Chrome Web Store. What’s more is they’re not just blocking them, but they also mentioned that could begin actively disabling ones already installed in your Chrome web browser — no permission necessary.

While we generally stick the Chrome Web Store for all our extension needs, there are those that haven’t passed Google’s terms of service (like YouTube downloader) and can only be downloaded direct from the developer. It feels a bit Apple in approach, but when data breaches and malware are seemingly spreading across the internet like wildfire, it’s better safe than sorry.

For the time being, it looks like this is going to be exclusive to Windows users. Nothing mentioned about OSX or Linux quite yet, but we’re sure their time is also coming.

[Google Chrome Blog |via 9to5Google]