Take that extension developers, Google has given another two months time to migrate your extension (if it’s not already hosted) in Chrome Web Store, if you won’t do that, after May 1, your extension installed on users Windows Chrome stable channel will be automatically disabled and it can’t be re-enabled like before, this policy has been already enforced for Windows beta channel and will be effective for the stable channel after 60 days.
Reason for doing this is to protect users from malicious extensions as they announced about this back in last November.
What happens after May 1 in case of off-store installed extensions?
Chrome disables that off-store extension by showing a suspicious extensions disabled notification, this doesn’t happen for extensions installed via enterprise policy and developer mode.
Don’t overjoy! extensions installed with developer mode may not last long, browser bugs you with disable developer mode extensions bubble every time when you launch your browser, there is no way to disable that.
If you, the developer registers your extension after the deadline, your users have to re-enable or re-install it manually.
Note: This policy doesn’t apply to Windows dev. and canary channels, as well as on Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. It’s not that Chromium team is asking you to switch to development channels, remember if you want to spin them, they’re buggy and not recommended for working environments. You can learn more details about this policy here.