Tonight while I was browsing the Chrome Extensions Gallery, I noticed something a bit odd. A recently uploaded theme returned the error you see above when I clicked it. OK, I thought... Maybe the author really did take it down.

So I tried again... Using some of the more popular themes, like the Android-inspired one I blogged about a while back. Again, the error appeared. Which got me thinking: could Google finally be divvying up the Extensions Gallery? Will extensions and themes be listed separately?

I certainly hope so.

Now, there's every chance that this is just some kind of temporary glitch -- but I certainly hope it's not. The gallery has been a disorganized mess since it opened. Yes, you can search, but why do we still not have basic things like categories or tags to help us discover new or related extensions?

So what's going to happen to them? Perhaps a better solution would be to move themes out of the Extensions Gallery entirely and add a third tab to the themes page: artist themes, themes by Google, user created themes. Makes sense to me, now we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Is Google getting ready to move user-created themes out of the Extensions Gallery? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:22:00 EST.