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GoFullPage Removed From Chrome. Prime Suspect: Pac-Man.

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A yellow square character with a square notch for a mouth advancing along a row of pellets towards a plain grey camera icon.
Our prime suspect, redrawn as a square to avoid any further copyright incidents. Illustration: AI-generated.

If you reached for GoFullPage last week and found a hole where your screenshot extension used to be, you are one of roughly 11 million people. The Chrome Web Store listing went down on or before 11 August. It was a Featured extension with a 4.9 rating from 84,000 reviews, which made its disappearance all the more conspicuous.

The GoFullPage Chrome Web Store listing showing the Featured badge, a 4.9 rating from 84,000 ratings, and 11,000,000 users.
The listing as it stood on 5 August 2026, six days before it came down. Captured from the Wayback Machine.

The developer, Full Page LLC, has been straight about it without being specific. A post on their blog on the evening of 11 August says GoFullPage was “temporarily removed from the Chrome Web Store due to a copyright-related issue”, that they believe “the removal was in error”, and that they are working with Google to sort it out. No takedown notice has been published. No complainant has been named. Google has said nothing at all.

Founder Peter Coles, who built the extension and published it in December 2012, went a little further in a thread on r/chrome. The removal, he wrote, “appears to be about a small design element that is not central to our branding”, and “we immediately took actions to fix this”.

A small design element. There are 154 files in that extension, so we compared them. There is one suspect, and he is 34 pixels tall.

One asset didn’t make it

There are two builds to work with: version 8.6, the last one published under the original listing, and version 8.8, the BETA the developer put up as a stopgap. Both contain 154 files. Nearly all of them are the usual rebuild churn, renamed bundles and recompiled stylesheets, dull as a Tuesday.

Four files were deleted, which is really two counted twice. Two source images:

images/anim.gif and images/anim@2x.gif, the standard and retina versions of one asset.

And the two hashed copies the build step generates from them, anim.2a26a9b2.gif and anim@2x.22bcd7f1.gif.

The asset itself is an 8-frame animated GIF, 34 pixels square, showing a dark circle with a V-shaped wedge opening and closing on its right-hand side. In the old build he was how you knew how far along a capture was. The further down the page GoFullPage went, the further he munched his way along a row of dots.

An eight-frame animation of a dark circle with a wedge-shaped mouth opening and closing.
The deleted file, and the progress bar it drove, rebuilt from version 8.6's own markup and stylesheet. Via: Full Page LLC.

A little chap eating a line of pellets, as a progress indicator. Black rather than yellow, as it happens: the GIF’s colour table is greyscale from top to bottom, without a single coloured pixel in it.

The GoFullPage popup showing a capture in progress, with a chomping wedge character travelling along a row of black dots as the progress bar. The same popup in the BETA, the character and dots replaced by a row of plain grey rectangles.
Drag to compare. The developer's own store listing images, before and after: same popup, same copy, different progress bar. Via: Full Page LLC, Chrome Web Store.

In the BETA he is gone, along with the dots he was eating and every line of code that referenced him. In his place is a row of grey rectangles that pulse up and down. The loading bar is now ten pixels shorter and considerably less fun.

Nothing else was touched. Not the icon font, not the browser-frame graphics, not the cursors. Of every image in a 154-file extension, one went missing, and it was the arcade character.

We are not saying Pac-Man did it

We are saying he is no longer in the building.

This matters, because the temptation is to draw a straight line from A to B and publish it as fact. The comparison shows what the developer changed. It does not show why the store acted.

Full Page LLC say the removal was a mistake, and they deleted the animation anyway. That is not a contradiction. If pulling one file gets 11 million people their screenshot tool back, you pull the file and argue about it afterwards.

What we can say is that of everything in the package, exactly one thing was considered surplus to requirements, and anyone with the two builds can check it in about a minute.

There is one more thing, and it is the most telling. GoFullPage on Microsoft Edge was never removed. Microsoft objected to nothing, took nothing down, and the listing has been live throughout. Yet at 02:39 UTC on 12 August, some eight hours after that blog post went up, Edge got the same 8.8 update. We checked that package too, and the animation is gone from there as well. It has been taken out of a storefront that never asked for it, as an ordinary update to the existing listing rather than a separate BETA. Which still proves nothing about cause, but it does mean the deletion was not a narrow gesture aimed at one shop window.

It isn’t malware, whatever Chrome told you

Worth clearing up, because Chrome’s Safety Check is currently telling people to “Review one extension that may be unsafe”, advising that “Chrome recommends that you remove it”, and noting that GoFullPage “violates the Chrome Web Store policy”.

Chrome's Safety Check panel reading 'Review one extension that may be unsafe, Chrome recommends that you remove it', listing GoFullPage as off and violating the Chrome Web Store policy.
What Chrome shows users of the removed extension. The same wording appears for every policy removal, whatever the policy.

Chrome says exactly that whether an extension was harvesting your banking details or bothering a games company from 1980. The wording does not distinguish between the two, and most people reading it will assume the worst.

Neither build contains anything malicious. Permissions are unchanged between versions. There is no eval, no remote code loading, no phoning home with your page content. The developer’s own line is that this was “definitively not a security issue with GoFullPage”, and reading the code, that holds up.

What to actually do

Don’t uninstall it. The developer’s advice is to leave the original in place so it comes back on its own if the listing is restored. If Chrome disabled the extension rather than removing it, you can switch it back on at chrome://extensions.

Install the BETA alongside it. It has a different signing key and a different extension ID, so it is a separate install rather than an update, and the two run happily side by side.

Edge users, carry on. GoFullPage still works there, premium access included, and it updated itself to the same 8.8 build on 12 August without any of the fuss. A Firefox version is in the works.

Check your own links to it. As the developer politely puts it, “most search engine results are still pointing to the currently disabled Chrome Web Store URL”. A page with 11 million users behind it does not drop out of the rankings just because it stopped working, so the top result for a very popular tool has spent a fortnight sending people to a dead end while the working links sit on a blog nobody searches for. If you’ve got a resources page, a client onboarding doc or a team toolkit pointing at that listing, it currently points at nothing.

We’ll update this if the extension returns. In the meantime, pour one out for the little guy.

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