About ExtensionTrust

New browser extensions launch every day. Some are great. Some quietly read every page you visit, harvest your data, or get sold to a new owner who flips them into adware. We exist to answer one question with evidence: is this browser extension safe to install?

We don't review from opinion, vendor briefings, or sponsored trials. We build each Extension Safety Profile from public, verifiable evidence, and every claim links back to a dated source you can open yourself. Our scoring rubric is public — read the methodology.

How we build a safety profile

For each extension we inspect five things, using only public records:

• Publisher & Identity — the publisher behind the listing, plus domain and developer records: is there a real, identifiable operator behind the extension?
• Permissions & Access — what the extension can actually do, based on its manifest and the permissions it requests from your browser.
• Data & Privacy — the privacy policy read in full and tracked for changes over time, with the wording quoted verbatim rather than paraphrased.
• Maintenance & Ownership — update history and ownership signals from the public store listing, so you know whether it's still actively maintained.
• Community Reputation — public store reviews and complaints, shown with their source so you can judge for yourself.

We score these into five dimensions and only mark an extension indexable once the core checks are covered. Nothing here comes from a hands-on trial — it comes from the paper trail, cited and dated.

The team

ExtensionTrust is run by a small editorial team. Today, every profile on the site is an automated safety profile assembled from public records — not a paid review and not a personal opinion. As we publish hands-on reviews, each will carry a named author byline here and on the review itself. Our standards are public in the editorial policy, and you can always dispute a score.

What we are not

We are not a directory that lists everything, and we are not a marketing channel. No one can pay to be added, removed, or graded differently, and we run no sponsored reviews. Extensions in excluded categories (adult/NSFW content, crypto wallet drainers, anything built to spy) are not listed at all.

Think a score is wrong or out of date? That's the system working — tell us at Dispute & Corrections, or see how we handle conflicts in our editorial policy.