obfuscation - Does Chrome Market accept extensions with minified and/or obfuscated source code?

Question

I'm currently developing a Chrome extension and planning to publish it on Chrome market. I'm aware of open-source community benefits, however, do not want to share the source code and a bit worried about copyrights. Currently, the plan is to minify and obfuscate the source code before publishing. So the questions is:

Does Chrome Market accept extensions with minified and/or obfuscated source code?

Thanks in advance! :)

Answer 1

Any existing answers above have been rendered obsolete by the terms change on January 1st, 2019. This change was announced on October 1st, 2018.

In summary:

• Google Allows minified code.
• Google disallows obfuscated code.

The specific policy, available at https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/program_policies, is as follows:

Developers must not obfuscate code or conceal functionality of their extension. This also applies to any external code or resource fetched by the extension package. Minification is allowed, including the following forms:

• Removal of whitespace, newlines, code comments, and block delimiters
• Shortening of variable and function names
• Collapsing files together