Last step- opening crx does not work

[akh8zm]

Hi! Thanks so much for the guide, it was very clear and helpful to a novice like myself. The only thing I wanted to comment on was that the last step, opening the .crx file in google chrome, did not work for me. Instead, I had to click the "Load unpacked" button within chrome:\\extensions developer mode, then choose my file directory that I had just packed.

[2bbits-eddy]

For future reference.
It should be noted that your .crx file is your modified extension all packed together into one file that you can share. You can drag and drop the .crx file into chrome://extentions page there will be a popup asking to add *insert extension name*. It would be wise to also when changing parameters within the manifest.json file to also change the name of the extension, in the original post it is under the 5th line, "name": "*insert extension name*" to not get confused.

[mike-u]

You're right @akh8zm, I haven't seen that CRX_REQUIRED_PROOF_MISSING error before. It seems like it started with Chrome 75. @2bbits-eddy, thanks for figuring out that dragging it onto the window bypasses that, I'm not sure that's intentional but it's good to know there's an easy workaround.

Changing the manifest.json's key field to the contents of the generated .pem file and repacking didn't fix it. Same with changing manifest_version to 3 since that's the latest, and same with installing offline to avoid Google getting an incorrect response from the update_server field. I think going forward I'll change the guide to only recommend loading unpacked extensions to avoid this whole mess.