While fine-grained extension sync isn't an option in Chrome, it's certainly possible to run different extensions on different machines using the same Google log

While fine-grained extension sync isn't an option in Chrome, it's certainly possible to run different extensions on different machines using the same Google login - simply disable the extension sync once you have your "basic" set of extensions. Centralized storage is an optional but fully functional API in Chrome extensions. Many extensions simply opt not to use it for whatever reasons. (I'm not sure if the storage synchronizing also gets disabled by disabling the syncing of extensions. This should be made more clear, along with fine-grained extension synchronization.) But yes, there needs to be some kind of solution to the install order issue of the network request API. I don't know why this hasn't been addressed yet.