Chrome will refuse to load .crx files from random websites, but it'll trust .crx packages loaded from the local filesystem in developer mode, because it assumes you're developing them. So, providing a .crx in a .zip and recommending the use of developer mode suggests that they want to work around Chrome's normal protections against loading Chrome extensions from random sites. Doing so rather than just uploading it to the Chrome Web Store seems very questionable.
Yea but Chrome will accept any .crx file if you drop it onto the extensions tab. So it would in effect be the same thing, just a bit nicer for the user since they don't have to extract a zip and then browse to where it was extracted and load the extension.
Yea, one of our guys got a little excited and decided to post to HN a little prematurely. Right now we are just testing out our prototype and thus the .zip file. We will probably upload to the Chrome store next week. Definitely not trying to be shady...
