Trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing
What it is
Enhanced Safe Browsing is the strongest of Chrome's Safe Browsing settings. When someone who has it turned on installs an extension from the Chrome Web Store, Chrome checks whether Enhanced Safe Browsing trusts the extension. If it doesn't, Chrome first shows a dialog saying "This extension is not trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing", and the person can continue or cancel.
According to Google's help page, an extension is trusted when its developer follows the Chrome Web Store's Developer Program Policies, and new developers generally take a few months to become trusted. Google doesn't publish which extensions are trusted.
Where our data comes from
Chrome asks Google's update service whether the extensions it has installed have new versions. For each
extension, the service's answer also carries a flag, _esbAllowlist, set to true or false. We ask
the update service about every extension once a day, and we've recorded the flag since 26 September 2026.
Google doesn't document the flag, but Chrome's open-source code reads it to decide which extensions to warn about (a 2021 change to Chromium). Our figures also fit Google's description: trust is rare among new extensions, common among established ones, and usually covers all of a developer's extensions together.
What it doesn't mean
An extension that isn't trusted isn't necessarily harmful. Most of them are new, because trust comes only after a developer has followed the policies for a few months.
Trust isn't a guarantee either. Of the 162 extensions that left the store between 26 September and 1 October 2026, 82 were trusted at their last check. The store doesn't say why an extension was removed.
The figures on 1 October 2026
These figures cover the 266,617 extensions live in the Chrome Web Store on 1 October 2026, after that day's check. We won't update them; each extension's page shows its current status.
Of those extensions, 167,146 (63%) were trusted and 99,470 (37%) weren't. One had no status.
By number of users
| Users | Extensions | Trusted |
|---|---|---|
| No user count shown | 13,542 | 35% |
| Fewer than 100 | 187,414 | 56% |
| 100 to 999 | 41,482 | 85% |
| 1,000 to 9,999 | 16,501 | 92% |
| 10,000 to 99,999 | 5,976 | 95% |
| 100,000 or more | 1,701 | 98% |
The store shows no user count for most new extensions.
By year first published
| First published | Extensions | Trusted |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 125,523 | 44% |
| 2025 | 61,116 | 64% |
| 2024 | 29,830 | 86% |
| 2023 | 19,016 | 91% |
| 2022 | 12,195 | 92% |
| 2021 | 5,851 | 94% |
| 2020 or earlier | 13,080 | 96% |
Five extensions without a publish date are left out.
By access to websites
| Access | Extensions | Trusted |
|---|---|---|
| Can read and change data on every website | 82,543 | 67% |
| Can't | 184,073 | 61% |
By developer
Trust usually covers a developer's extensions together. Of the 35,125 developer accounts with two or more live extensions, 26,224 had it for all of them, 6,808 for none and 2,093 for some.
How it changes
The status changes in batches. Between 26 and 30 September 2026 we saw it change once. The check on 1 October found 14,711 changes: 14,285 extensions became trusted, 13,224 of them first published in 2026, and 426 stopped being trusted.
On our pages and in the data
Each extension's page shows whether Enhanced Safe Browsing trusts it, among the listing's details. For a removed extension, it's the status at the last check. The change log records every change, as "Now trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing" or "No longer trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing".
The weekly data files have the status in the extensions file's
esb_allowlist column, and every change in the changes file. Our
methodology explains how we collect the rest of the data.