Google Chrome extensions another lease of life

Several years after Google first announced plans to retire its Manifest V2 browser API, and after having made several empty promises and revisions, spent much of 2022 in and out of readiness for its successor, Manifest V3.

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However, the company has now delayed the transition from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 once again, meaning that it lives on for a little longer.

While Chrome stopped accepting new Manifest V2 extensions last year, and stopped visibility changes for existing V2 extensions, Google’s plans for 2023 and 2024 have been postponed.

Chrome MV2

In an email (opens in new tab) to developers, Developer Relations Engineer Oliver Dunk explained that the company is still working on a phase-out plan for MV2 and that a turn-off for MV2 is still several months away.

“We remain committed to the rollout of MV3 to improve security, privacy, and performance for our users around the world,” he noted.

The email covers Google’s plan to roll out MV2 “in a timely manner” and that feedback continues to be crucial. An MV2 phase-out plan is expected “in the coming months” and developers can expect “at least 6 months of heads-up”, emphasizing the lengthy delay for the much-anticipated MV3.

How to Transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome Extensions

With June 2023 plans to unlist public MV2 extensions and January 2024 plans to both stop accepting MV2 extension updates and the removal of MV2 extensions all on hold, developers are beginning to lose faith in MV3 with one saying that it will arrive when Apple’s headset arrives (another much-anticipated but delayed product).

The move to MV3 has also sparked some disgruntlement among Internet users over fears that ad-blockers will no longer work on Chromium-based browsers, virtually putting an end to any hope of private browsing.

Why the transition to Manifest 3 is important

Manifest V3 is an API that Google will use in its Chrome browser. It is the successor to the current API, Manifest V2, and governs how Chrome extensions interact with the browser. Manifest V3 introduces significant changes to the rules for extensions, some of which will be the new mainstay from V2 we were used to.

The transition to Manifest V3 can be summarized as such:

The transition has been ongoing since 2018.
Manifest V3 will officially begin rolling out in January 2023.
By June 2023, extensions that run Manifest V2 will no longer be available on the Chrome Web Store.
Extensions that do not comply with the new rules introduced in Manifest V3 will eventually be removed from the Chrome Web Store.

One of the main goals of Manifest V3 is to make users safer and improve the overall browser experience. Previously, many browser extensions relied on code in the cloud, meaning it could be difficult to assess whether an extension was risky. Manifest V3 aims to address this by requiring extensions to contain all the code they will run, allowing Google to scan them and detect potential risks. It also forces extensions to request permission from Google for the changes they can implement on the browser.

Staying up-to-date with Google’s transition to Manifest V3 is important because it introduces new rules for extensions that aim to improve user safety and the overall browser experience, and extensions that do not comply with these rules will eventually be removed from the Chrome Web Store.

In short, all of your hard work in creating extensions that used Manifest V2 could be for naught if you do not make this transition in the coming months.

January 2023	June 2023	January 2024
Support for Manifest V2 extensions will be turned off in Chrome’s Canary, Dev, and Beta channels.	The Chrome Web Store will no longer allow Manifest V2 extensions to be published with visibility set to Public.	The Chrome Web Store will remove all remaining Manifest V2 extensions.
Manifest V3 will be required for the Featured badge in the Chrome Web Store.	Existing Manifest V2 extensions that are published and publically visible will become unlisted.	Support for Manifest 2 will end for all of Chrome’s channels, including the Stable channel, unless the Enterprise channel is extended.

Manifest V3 will have an impact only on development. However, its long-term ramifications could ultimately be felt by users, provided they keep using Google Chrome. The whole situation seems like a golden opportunity for competitors such as Brave, which has adblocking as an innate feature, and Mozilla Firefox.