The median Chrome extension has 24 users, and 18.9 percent of them request access to every website you visit. The store is far larger and far emptier than it looks: Google's own sitemap lists 360,306 items, of which about a fifth are themes rather than extensions, and only about 3 percent of extensions have passed ten thousand users. Measured September 2026 from a random sample of the whole store.
| Percentile | Users |
|---|---|
| 10th | 5 |
| 25th | 8 |
| 50th (median) | 24 |
| 75th | 149 |
| 90th | 1,000 |
| 99th | 70,000 |
| Users | Share of extensions |
|---|---|
| 1,000,000 or more | 0.1% |
| 100,000 or more | 0.6% |
| 10,000 or more | 3.3% |
| 1,000 or more | 10.2% |
| 100 or more | 27.6% |
| 10 or more | 68.2% |
The median Chrome extension has 24 users. The store's own front page is built from the top thousandth of it. Reaching ten thousand users puts an extension in the top 3 percent.
Google's sitemap lists 360,306 items. In the sample, 313 of 1,450, or 21.6 percent, are themes rather than extensions. Any figure quoted for "the number of Chrome extensions" should say which of these it counts.
| What it can do | Manifest permission | Share of extensions |
|---|---|---|
| Store data locally | storage | 68.0% |
| The current tab, when clicked | activeTab | 35.7% |
| Run scripts in pages | scripting | 29.7% |
| Read your open tabs | tabs | 24.9% |
| Every website you visit | <all_urls> and equivalents | 18.9% |
| Scheduled background work | alarms | 11.8% |
| Right click menu entries | contextMenus | 11.1% |
| A side panel | sidePanel | 9.8% |
| Send you notifications | notifications | 7.6% |
| Manage your downloads | downloads | 6.3% |
13.5 percent of extensions declare no permissions at all.
We separately read all 576 extensions Google shows on its 18 category pages. The contrast is the most useful thing in this dataset.
| Group | Request access to every site | Still on Manifest V2 |
|---|---|---|
| The whole store (random sample) | 18.9% | 3.8% |
| The 576 Google features | 42.0% | 0% |
Among the featured set, the category asking for total access most often was privacy and security at 28 of 32. A permission survey of the front page overstates the store by more than double, which is worth knowing before quoting either number.
On 2026-09-08 we fetched all 43 shards of the Chrome Web Store sitemap, which together list 360,306 distinct listing URLs, drew a random sample of 1,500 with a fixed seed, and fetched each listing page. 1,450 parsed successfully. Each page embeds the listing's user count, rating, category and complete manifest, and every figure comes from those. User counts are available for 1,098 of the sampled listings; Google omits the figure on some small listings, which are excluded from the user percentiles.
The featured comparison comes from a separate pass over all 18 category pages, which show 32 extensions each, 576 in total.
The figures on this page are free to quote and republish with attribution (CC BY 4.0). The same numbers in machine readable form: chrome-extension-permissions.json.
sellerkit, “Chrome Web Store: size, reach and permissions, 2026”, 2026-09-08. https://legal.sellerkit.workers.dev/data/chrome-extension-permissions