The Problem

Towards the end of 2013, Google announced a major policy decision which may affect users who do not use Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web store. Here is an excerpt from the blog post.

Extensions are a great way to enhance the browsing experience; whether users want to quickly post to social networks or to stay up to date with their favorite sports teams. Many services bundle useful companion extensions, which causes Chrome to ask whether you want to install them (or not). However, bad actors have abused this mechanism, bypassing the prompt to silently install malicious extensions that override browser settings and alter the user experience in undesired ways, such as replacing the New Tab  Page without approval. In fact, this is a leading cause of complaints from our Windows users.

Since these malicious extensions are not hosted on the Chrome Web Store, it’s difficult to limit the damage they can cause to our users. As part of our continuing security efforts, we’re announcing a stronger measure to protect Windows users: starting in January on the Windows stable and beta channels, we’ll require all extensions to be hosted in the Chrome Web Store.

We – as UFT/QTP users – are one among those who fall under this group. Till May 2014, if you have installed UFT, it would have automatically installed the UFT extension for Google Chrome but with this policy enforced, no Chrome extension will be automatically installed if it hosted on your local file system. A Chrome extension HAS to be hosted on Chrome web store to be able to get installed automatically.

The Solution

Once you have installed UFT, enable Developer mode in your Chrome browser and install UFT extension manually.

I have produced a step-by-step video on how to manually install UFT agent on Google Chrome browser. Please check the video below.

[In case YouTube is blocked at your place you can also view the video here.]

Please note the extension of your Chrome agent against the UFT version installed on your machine. For example: If you have UFT 12 installed, the only allowed extension version is 12.0.511.0

Google Chrome Agent Matrix

How is the new Chrome extension working for you after these changes? Please let us know in the comments section below.

Note: This announcement by Google is only applicable to users on Windows. It doesn’t apply to Mac, Linux or other OS users.