The launch of Google Chrome’s Manifesto v3 suffered from delays for several years, but now it seems the launch has finally taken place.

Google Chrome’s Manifesto v3 has received a lot of criticism from developers over the past few years because it would limit what ad blockers could do. This has largely led to the planned rollout being repeatedly postponed until today. Google announced that it will begin phasing out the old v2 system on Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary channels starting June 3rd.

Deep breath

The Manifest v3 system was announced back in 2019, but its introduction was associated with a great deal of effort. The reason? Errors played an important role, but the low level of interest from developers also slowed down the rollout. They fear that version 3 is too restrictive and does not use the functions of ad blockers. Google says it is in talks with developers and is accepting their feedback.

Developers, but also Chrome users, did not wait for Manifest v3, which is why Google put it on hold at the end of 2022. The following year, there will be new schedules for the introduction of Manifest v3, which were never met. The last planned rollout in March 2023 also went by like a flash. A final rollout seems to be planned for about a year later.

Goodbye Manifest v2, hello v3

The old Manifest v2 system will begin being phased out on June 3, and the new Manifest v3 is just around the corner. Google says that with Manifest v3, it wants to “protect existing functionality while improving the security, privacy, performance, and reliability of the extension ecosystem as a whole.”

According to Google, 85 percent of the “actively maintained” extensions in the Chrome Web Store have already created Manifest V3 versions, including some well-known ad blockers: AdBlock, Adblock Plus, uBlock and AdGuard.