Google has been trying to radically overhaul the Chrome browser extension experience for years, moving from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3, which is likely to reduce the effectiveness of some extensions, such as ad blockers. But once again this transition was postponed indefinitely.
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Last December, the company announced that the phase-out of Manifest V2 would begin in March, but March is over, and there has been no progress so far. As it turned out, the innovation is not yet ready, as the development team reported on their page – they are still “analyzing feedback, making changes and improving the documentation.” The developers also assured that the creators of the extensions will have enough time to migrate – at least six months. According to the latest data, this will happen next year.
There are indeed many objective reasons for abandoning Manifest V2: the old version of the API, for example, allows you to develop extensions that consume too many resources. It also does not work effectively with mobile platforms: Chrome for Android still does not support extensions, unlike Safari on iOS. Manifest V3, on the other hand, lacks the means to intercept and modify the content of web pages before they are displayed, which promises to make things harder for ad blockers. Google is not embarrassed – the company intends to go all the way and convince developers of other browsers, including Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, of their rightness. By the way, Mozilla has already found a compromise solution, while AdGuard said that they will cope with their task even after the final transition to Manifest V3.
In the meantime, according to the ChromeStats platform, today 128,000 extensions work on Manifest V2 and 34,000 support Manifest V3 – in December last year there were 136,000 and 30,000, respectively.
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