Comment by cletus

I'm reading the tea leaves here. I have no direct knowledge of the situation. I'm retelling a story that seems (at least to me) to be consistent with what little information is here. There's plenty you can criticize Google on but I'm not sure this qualifies. Let's not attribute malice without cause. Or even negligence. It's fair to ask if this needs to be here still and what it's for. Let's just not fly off the handle prematurely.

As for "retail" Chrome having this plugin, it would make total sense. Chrome is a massive codebase. Maintaining a fork is a significant amount of effort. It would be far easier to add APIs to Chrome and whitelist them for only google.com extensions/JS.