I'm currently developing a Chrome extension and planning to publish it on Chrome market. I'm aware of open-source community benefits, however, do not want to share the source code and a bit worried about copyrights. Currently, the plan is to minify and obfuscate the source code before publishing. So the questions is:
Does Chrome Market accept extensions with minified and/or obfuscated source code?
Thanks in advance! :)
Yes, you can use obfuscation tools (like jscrambler) before publishing your extension. I don't know if that may delay the publishing time, but I know for sure that are some published Chrome extensions with obfuscated/minified source code.
I, for instance, minify the code of my extension (LBTimer) with Google's Closure before publishing it.
Update with own experience:
I wasn't able to submit a build obfuscated with this javascript-obfuscator (more specifically, gulp version in my case) They were complaining about "your code is suspicious" so I guess something triggered an alert in their system.
However uglyfy worked for that - I still had to figure out a way to rename all the prototype functions as uglify doesn't seem to do that (or at least I wasn't able to find a way to do that)
Original answer:
To sum up, it seems like chrome extensions are allowed to be minified and obfuscated.
For more details, keep reading.
First of all, there are two different terms -
chrome extension
andchrome app
and different rules applies based on that. Chrome app has more strict requirements and it seems like mcastilloy2k's answer is suitable for chrome app (at least it looks like it is based on the available policies for both).And regarding the below google's answer:
If it's for
chrome extension
and not forchrome app
that seems strange as per the extension FAQ from google which explicitly states that extension is allowed to make external requests to execute custom API aka 'remotely hosted code':Another discussion in this google groups thread shows that rejection might not be connected with obfuscation at all:
Moreover one can always go and check existing extensions out there, like Grammarly for example, who has obfuscated code (to some extent at least) and who uses external API.
It looks like they don't approve minified and obfuscated code. You can check thread on the Chromium Google Group, from April '16.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/1Jsoo9BPWuM
You can get a more specific answer if you contact the Google Chrome team.