To quote the blog....

The developer signup fee is a one-time payment of $5. It is intended to create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts. Starting today, this fee will be required to publish extensions, themes and soon apps in the gallery. We are waiving the fee for developers who already registered with the gallery (specifically before 11am PST today), so that they can continue to update their extensions and publish new items without paying the fee.

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/08/sec...istration.html
Personally I think this is utterly disgusting, charge us to make things for your application?
Ohwell, I hope this just turns into another one of those things they apologise for later and say it was a mistake.

Why is it a bad thing? Its not like $5 is a lot of money. If it helps keep out some of the malicious crap like the Android apps and Apple apps have already had it is well worth it.

Is this a precursor to being able to sell your extensions there? :3 I heard something about them having an extensions store.