Loving the stream of articles from Wladimir Palant; perhaps the motivation is to get Google to police the web store more proactively.
On that note, I wonder if Google could build an automated review process where they build a representation of the normal behavior of the extension by installing it on their machines, and then ship that representation to the user. When the user installs the extension later, and it behaves too differently from the previously computed representation, it could trigger a manual review on Google’s end.
Unfortunately, an extension in use is expected to behave very differently from one that was merely installed. That’s the crux with observing software in sandboxes in order to determine its behavior.
On that note, I wonder if Google could build an automated review process where they build a representation of the normal behavior of the extension by installing it on their machines, and then ship that representation to the user. When the user installs the extension later, and it behaves too differently from the previously computed representation, it could trigger a manual review on Google’s end.