Why are some Chrome extensions grayed out in the extension toolbar?

Solution 1:

It's because Google changed something, i can testify on my own custom extension i wrote, it used to have a colorful icon and suddenly after Chrome updated itself the icon became gray (however the extension functioned properly).

For the developers who troubleshoot this annoying bug, (and google through it to this question), i answered to a similar question in Stack Overflow.

I had to find out more so iv'e reverse engineered the famous AD Block extension (that has a non-gray icon).

I tried to change things in the extension's manifast.json file, Eventually i found out that the following setting keeps the icon colorfull:

{
  ...

  "browser_action": {
    "default_icon": "icons/icon-32.png"
  },

  ...
}

• source - https://stackoverflow.com/a/38604189/3191896