Developers who are concerned about the phasing out of Manifest V2 can rest assured that it won't happen any time soon. Google will provide at least 6 months notice before beginning any experiments to turn it off in the browser and this is shunted into "next year".

It is over 4 years since Google announced the changes it was making to the Chrome Extension platform with Manifest 3, claiming that they were about  strengthening privacy, security, and performance while preserving and improving its foundation of capability and webbiness. The main feature of MV3 would be its ability to restrict the effectiveness of adblockers, something clearly in Google's interest given its revenue from advertising.

From the outset developers were showed strenuous opposition to Manifest 3 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for one, considering that it would be harmful to privacy preserving efforts.

Is it the strength of developer antagonism or the realization that aspects of MV3 are not in its own interest that caused Google to delay its original plans for phasing our MV2?  It's hard to say but the latest update on when MV2 might be shut off has no further information beyond what was revealed last December, see Google Delays Manifest V3 Again which includes the revised MV Support Timeline.

The commitment that Google will provide at least 6 months notice before beginning any experiments to turn it off in the browser came in a post from Oliver Dunk in the thread titled Pausing Manifest 2 phase-out changes. Made at the end March it fulfilled the commitment made in December by Simeon Vincent that more news about the updated phase-out plan and schedule would be forthcoming at the time.

The post is mainly about progress being made on Manifest 3 which is already available to those who want it. Dunk lists various areas of improvement including:

allowing extension events to extend a service worker’s lifetime

increasing in-memory session storage from 1 MB to 10 MB 

making service workers easier to use (including more flexible lifetimes with messaging and other APIs)

introducing more service worker APIs in general

The post concludes:

We remain committed to the rollout of MV3 to improve security, privacy, and performance for our users around the world. We also want to ensure that we phase out MV2 in a timely manner, and we’re continuing to listen to feedback from the developer community to help inform our improvements and timelines.

So while the post lacks news about when MV2 will be phased out it still seems that this is its inevitable fate.

• Ian Elliot is the author of several JavaScript books including JavaScript Async which covers service workers.

More Information

Pausing Manifest 2 phase-out changes 

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