Google is preparing to roll out Manifest V3, the Chrome extension specification, after all. The company says it will start phasing out the old system in Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary browsers starting June 3, The Verge reports.
Users of these browsers will receive a warning on the extension management page stating that Google will soon stop supporting extensions that work on Manifest V2.
The extensions won’t stop working instantly, but Google will gradually shut them down over several months. The main version of Chrome will also eventually receive these changes, and the full transition is scheduled for early 2025.
This lengthy transition of Manifest V3 is partly due to the reaction of users that it may affect the operation of most ad blockers in the browser.
Manifest tells the browser all the necessary information about the extension: from its name and version number to the permissions it will use and in which browser versions it will run.
New versions of the Manifest format change the functions that extensions have access to. For example, Manifest V3 in Chrome no longer allows developers to download code from a remote server.
The company has tried to make life easier for extension developers by adding support for custom scripts and increasing the number of rule sets for the declarativeNetRequest API used by ad blockers.
The company claims that 85% of “actively supported” Chrome extensions have already built Manifest V3 versions, including some of the most popular ad blockers such as AdBlock, Adblock Plus, uBlock, and AdGuard.
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