Categories

Part 1 of this series broke down the Chrome Web Store’s metrics on reach (installations / users), paid vs free extensions, and language. In this part we look into extension categories, ratings, authorship and more.

The Chrome Web Store has 84 categories. A quick look shows the most popular category is “Productivity” accounting for ~40k extensions and 676M installs.

Let’s break down the number of extensions in each category excluding the ~18k that are uncategorized.

category # of extensions productivity 39,765 fun 24,773 photos 21,742 web_development 12,252 communication 11,953 accessibility 9,716 search_tools 8,319 shopping 6,313 games 4,749 news 3,308 education 3,146 business_tools 2,695 blogging 1,913 arcade_action 1,882 sports 1,843 lifestyle 1,717 entertainment 1,492 utilities 1,363 academic_resources 1,149 office_applications 1,133 puzzle_brain 1,048 arcade_games 1,033 action_and_adventure_games 849 puzzle_games 738 teacher_and_admin_tools 668 creative_tools 632 marketing_and_analytics 571 teacher_tools 524 accounting_and_finance 507 music_and_radio 502 board_card 485 news_reporting 425 food_and_health 411 role_playing_strategy 408 music 384 sales_and_crm 357 administration_and_management 311 educational_games 310 task_management 299 travel 294 health_fitness 287 search_and_browsing_tools 270 board_games 246 foreign_languages 246 social_networks 242 sports_game 241 strategy_games 241 card_games 239 online_documents_and_file_storage 224 blogs 223 calculators 177 online_videos 172 tv_movies 169 role_playing_games 167 test_preparation 163 family 156 virtual_worlds 156 school_administration 144 chat_and_im 142 hr_and_legal 140 calendar_and_scheduling 139 money 129 food 124 books 119 radio 118 by_artists 118 religion 117 alarms_and_clocks 116 design_essentials 106 erp_and_logistics 103 notepads 99 news_aggregators 91 phone_and_sms 89 email_and_contacts 82 bookmarks 72 dictionaries 66 newspapers 61 weather_forecasts 54 magazines 50 fashion 48 social_news 44 astrology 42 dating 33 by_google 26

Taking a look at categories by installs, we see that productivity is 5x more popular than the next biggest category.

category installs productivity 676,147,676 communication 111,671,905 photos 109,103,337 fun 105,043,823 web_development 96,030,111 education 92,387,979 accessibility 83,818,353 shopping 82,272,965 entertainment 62,567,535 search_tools 56,028,934 office_applications 43,787,834 teacher_and_admin_tools 37,722,599 teacher_tools 37,253,849 games 31,956,052 academic_resources 29,329,452 utilities 18,612,225 creative_tools 16,075,901 music_and_radio 15,835,473 music 15,405,296 news 11,800,107 puzzle_brain 11,106,842 online_videos 10,683,185 arcade_action 9,458,576 puzzle_games 8,831,266 sports 8,011,173 books 7,075,610 business_tools 6,044,918 arcade_games 5,187,204 foreign_languages 4,443,957 action_and_adventure_games 4,271,372 role_playing_strategy 3,477,493 accounting_and_finance 3,399,186 board_card 3,329,450 lifestyle 3,166,890 tv_movies 3,121,885 search_and_browsing_tools 2,863,272 family 2,823,010 task_management 2,812,489 by_artists 2,799,974 calculators 2,630,775 news_reporting 2,452,372 chat_and_im 2,427,633 social_networks 2,398,029 educational_games 2,275,576 sports_game 2,257,231 blogging 2,254,597 news_aggregators 2,247,684 online_documents_and_file_storage 2,224,125 strategy_games 2,031,811 card_games 1,927,321 notepads 1,917,882 weather_forecasts 1,658,244 role_playing_games 1,445,682 board_games 1,402,129 alarms_and_clocks 1,284,219 design_essentials 1,158,893 virtual_worlds 1,061,502 by_google 934,725 email_and_contacts 887,331 money 816,862 food_and_health 667,544 phone_and_sms 614,531 health_fitness 586,593 bookmarks 529,347 calendar_and_scheduling 525,551 marketing_and_analytics 516,461 dictionaries 501,876 school_administration 468,750 radio 430,177 travel 412,941 sales_and_crm 378,473 religion 349,069 test_preparation 345,080 hr_and_legal 163,105 newspapers 122,894 administration_and_management 119,053 food 80,951 erp_and_logistics 75,896 blogs 66,189 astrology 44,267 social_news 41,701 dating 31,096 magazines 15,605 fashion 3,155

Power laws play heavily here and a majority of installs are attributed to the most popular extension in each category. The following table show the most popular extension in each category. Some of these category winners lead multiple categories while others appear tied only because the Chrome Web Store does not report install counts beyond 10M installs for any given extension. WeVideo dominates the 'online_video' category with ~60% of the category's install base, while Movistar+ leads the 'fun' category with only a 1.8% share.

category extension installs productivity AdBlock 10M+ productivity Adblock Plus - free ad blocker 10M+ productivity Adobe Acrobat 10M+ productivity G Suite Training 10M+ productivity Google Translate 10M+ productivity Grammarly for Chrome 10M+ productivity LastPass: Free Password Manager 10M+ productivity Pinterest Save button 10M+ productivity Tampermonkey 10M+ productivity uBlock Origin 10M+ productivity, web_development Text 10M+ shopping Avast SafePrice 10M+ shopping Honey 10M+ entertainment, photos Google Photos 10M+ accessibility Read&Write for Google Chrome™ 10M+ communication Cisco Webex Extension 10M+ communication Skype 10M+ education, teacher_tools, teacher_and_admin_tools Google Classroom 10M+ online_videos WeVideo - Video Editor and Maker 6,365,591 office_applications Google Drawings 6,037,852 search_tools Search Encrypt 4,368,672 music, music_and_radio Google Play 4,358,041 books Kindle Cloud Reader 3,908,443 academic_resources Desmos Graphing Calculator 3,806,791 utilities ScanQR 2,563,113 foreign_languages Duolingo on the Web 2,416,798 puzzle_brain, puzzle_games, games Entanglement Web App 2,276,047 fun Player para ver Movistar+ 1,920,870 creative_tools MindMeister 1,674,734 family DOGOnews 1,383,257 social_networks TweetDeck by Twitter 1,381,555 accounting_and_finance, business_tools Click&Clean App 1,323,158 tv_movies TV 1,312,229 search_and_browsing_tools mydlink services plugin 1,093,352 news, news_reporting, news_aggregators Google News 917,371 notepads Sticky Notes 863,619 weather_forecasts Full Screen Weather 773,916 blogging Google Voice (by Google) 701,640 calculators Calculator 689,957 card_games, board_card Solitaire 618,533 design_essentials Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool 609,556 arcade_action, arcade_games Canvas Rider 585,230 chat_and_im WhatsChrome 555,504 educational_games Typing Test - KeyHero 550,270 task_management Wunderlist - To-do and Task list 524,525 money, lifestyle Google Finance 493,632 action_and_adventure_games Free Rider HD 472,382 alarms_and_clocks Timer 436,182 role_playing_games, role_playing_strategy グランブルーファンタジー[ChromeApps版] 397,469 sports_game WGT Golf Challenge 360,595 strategy_games Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances 358,288 sports Baseball Wallpaper HD - MLB New Tab 301,355 by_artists Cath Kidston 280,015 phone_and_sms mysms - SMS from Computer 265,928 online_documents_and_file_storage Network File Share for Chrome OS 263,209 email_and_contacts Google Groups 231,937 dictionaries Dictionary 209,591 board_games Dominoes 186,887 religion Bible 185,440 school_administration My Study Life 180,459 virtual_worlds Stardoll 177,921 by_google Brushed 174,083 calendar_and_scheduling Calendar Clock 165,428 food_and_health, health_fitness Personal Trainer 138,420 bookmarks New Tab Page by Speed Dial Team 127,151 marketing_and_analytics vidIQ for Chrome 108,316 travel Booking.com 96,992 test_preparation ProConnect 76,072 hr_and_legal Resume (CV) Maker 75,405 radio Mixcloud 66,962 newspapers USA TODAY 66,033 sales_and_crm Zoho CRM 63,065 administration_and_management TeamGantt Project Management 48,552 erp_and_logistics W2MO: Logistics Design, Optimization, 3D 37,462 food Simply Recipes 28,735 astrology What do your dreams mean 17,808 dating Sender.Services 15,090 blogs Roblox News 12,982 social_news reddit 10,057 magazines DER SPIEGEL 4,360 fashion NEW 2014 Virtual Hairstyle Gallery 1,854

Authors

Of the ~190k extensions, we find that some extension authors are more prolific than others. Google itself authors 155 extensions accounting for ~133M installs. The top 10 Google extensions are:

Google, however, is not the most prolific author of extensions. Chrome HD Themes has published over 6,000 extensions. The top 5 most prolific extension authors appear to be theme / wallpaper publishers.

name # of extensions Chrome HD Themes 6,128 Lovely Tab 1,343 Takato Knights 1,181 NEWTAB WALLPAPERS THEMES 1,006 NIFTY NEW TAB 979

Finally, investigating the author with the most installs, we find that FreeAddon has accumulated ~72M installs across 618 published extensions.

Ratings

Users can rate Chrome extensions from 1 to 5 stars. 70,547 extensions have a 0 rating indicating they have not been rated. 2,663 extensions have the lowest possible rating of 1 while 41,141 (~21%) extensions have a perfect rating of 5.

Unrated extensions have an install base of ~18M while extensions with perfect ratings have an install base of ~58M. Finally, ~55%* of the total extension install base goes to extensions with a rating between 4 and 5 stars.

* We can only derive a lower bound total extension install base of 1,561,796,203 (1.56B) because Google does not report accurate figures for extensions with over 10M installs. 19 such extensions exists as of 9/12/19.

Names

Just for fun, let’s take a look at some of the metrics behind extension names. 11-character names are the most popular with a sharp drop off after 45 characters (the character limit).

Not all extensions seem to respect the 45-character limit. Of the 514 extensions that seem exempt from it, most are add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, etc… As such, Google appears to add “ - Google Docs add-on” to their names. However, others seem to elude the 45 character limit by using dashes, pipes, commas or other special characters. For example:

There are 20,408 extensions that share a name with another extension. Highlights include 22 extensions called Hello World, 21 more called Hello World!, 18 called 2048, and 29 called New Tab. Here are the top 3, though:

name # of extensions ThemeBeta.com 137 Reptile 79 Screen Capturing 77

Reptile? Yes, there are 79 individual extensions called Reptile published by the same author, Atavi.com, each being a browser theme with a different background image. The sum total install base is 721 with 374 of those users preferring this background.

“Screen Capturing” is a different story with a diverse set of authors all publishing under the same name. The sum total install base is 45,300 with the top extension making up nearly all of those installs (44,542 installs).

We broke down extension names into lexemes to explore the most used lexemes and the prevalence of certain terms we find interesting. The top 5 most popular lexemes appear to all relate to theming Chrome. They are:

lexeme # of extensions new 25,137 tab 23,703 wallpapers 19,628 hd 19,367 theme 18,391

Additionally, we found that 1,586 extensions include every top 5 lexeme in their name. They represent a sum total install base of 1,767,944.

For threat intelligence, we’re interested in exploring the details of a number of relevant lexemes. Some of those are listed here:

lexeme # of extensions installs vpn 132 32,611,139 adblock 68 28,526,932+ password 290 23,155,172+ search 2,361 22,847,412 security 92 20,277,902+ ublock 8 12,311,322+ tracking 154 2,809,981 roblox 106 2,555,684 bitcoin 177 562,471 cookies 66 521,332 cryptocurrency 49 24,621

Coming up in future parts…

In part 3, we’re really going to get down to business and talk about permissions and content security. We are a security startup after all. This will be very revealing. Even we were surprised when we first started digging into this data.

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