14 DAY TRIAL // The Chromium developers are working on a solution that should allow users to cast media content to the Chromecast without the need to have the Google Cast extension.
Google is still pushing for the wide adoption of Chromecast, and they had moderate success with it. Developers are working on improving the general usability, and having users bypass one of the steps is one way to do that. The Google Cast extension is not much of a problem, but having to know about it and to install it might be considered redundant.
The developers are still working on this feature, but from the looks of it, the next Google Chrome will have this integrated. It can be done right now, with some trickery, but if you don’t want to do this, you can wait until it comes through the regular channels.
How it's going to work
"The chromium team is currently experimenting in Beta Channel with casting tabs without the Google Cast extension installed thanks to the new Media Router. By simply enabling the experimental flag ‘Media Router’ at chrome://flags/#media-router, the Google Cast extension will be disabled, and you'll be able to right-click on a page and see a new ‘Cast...’ menu” developer François Beaufort explained in a Google+ post.
This is probably one of the biggest features of the upcoming Google Chrome release, so we’ll likely get more information about it. Unfortunately, there is no indication yet on what media this will work on.
It would be nice to be able to push an entire tab to Chromecast, but for now, the feature seems to be focused on multimedia content. We can hope that once the feature officially lands in Google Chrome, the developers will be inclined to provide more information about what it is capable of.
Chromecast hasn’t been in the news for a while now, and Google hasn’t said anything about updating the hardware with a new model.