About ChromeStats

Missions

Browser extensions ecosystem is broken. It is hurting everyone. Regular users need the convenience of browser extensions, but do not know which ones are really safe to install. Organizations need to allow their employees to use browser extensions to enhance productivity, but one malicious extension can lead to leaking proprietary secrets. Extension developers also faced many challenges. 85% of extensions have less than 1,000 users. There are no tools to help them stand out against competition. They can rarely monetize their works. As a result, some turn to selling user data, injecting ads, replacing search engines, or even sell their extensions to shady organizations.

We started working on ChromeStats in Oct 2020 to fix up the broken ecosystem by making Chrome extension metrics more accessible to everyone, enabling competitive analysis, identifying the bad actors, and help support the growth of good Chrome extensions.

We help extension developers succeed by providing friendly tools to analyze extension performance in Chrome Web Store, giving developers a chance to compete in a crowded marketplace.

We help users and organizations get back in controls by giving everyone more insights into the risk factors associated with each extension, allowing them to quickly identify high risk extensions at a glance.

In 2022, we expand our service to support EdgeStats and FirefoxStats as well, providing the same level of insights as ChromeStats, but for Edge and Firefox add-ons.

How does it work

Started in late 2020, we crawl Chrome Web Store to take a daily snapshot of publicly available data. We keep track of the changes over time, and analyze the data to identify anomaly, suspicious patterns, and derive insights from big data. A large part of our data is made publicly available, with additional data available for paid subscriptions.

Who we are

My name is Hao Nguyen. I am the solo founder of ChromeStats. I work on ChromeStats in my spare time. I have created a number of browser extensions, such as ModHeader, ModResponse, Lucky, etc. Because of them, I understand the challenges that extension developers are facing. I created ChromeStats to overcome these challenges.