Are there any security implications to enabling developer mode?
As long you are careful with the extension you install manually you should be fine.
e.g. from https://windirstat.net/download.html
For installing an unpacked extension:
- Obviously you don't have the benefit of the Chrome store checking for abuse.
- You'll need to read the manifest.json file yourself to see what permissions you're granting, because the warning popup doesn't show up when installing this way.
- There's a few attacks that unpacked extensions can do because they can spoof their extension ID, and Chrome doesn't consider it a bug. See: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=130196...
The extension developer could add a malicious permission + new code to exploit it and it would look the same as using developer mode to add a Hello World extension