It’s been a while since Google announced its intention to do this Manifesto V3 to become the reference specification for Chrome extensions. Although the company has promised improvements in aspects such as security, many accuse it of trying to do away with ad blockers and trackers. However, perhaps because of the criticism and refusal of some to leave Manifesto V2Google announced the extension of support for the latter.

Google intended to retire Manifest V2 in January 2023 for home users and in June of that year for enterprise support, but announced the change in a post on the Chrome Developers Blog to make the transition smoother for users and developers to get the information they need, with plenty of time to transition to a new version of the manifesto.”

The Mountain View image has the detailed dates, versions, and channels that Manifest V2 will end up with, which have now been defined as follows:

• Starting in January in Chrome 112, Chrome may experiment with disabling support for the Manifest V2 extension on the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels.
• Starting in June in Chrome 115, Chrome may experiment with disabling support for the Manifest V2 extension in all channels, including the stable channel.
• In January 2023, using Manifest V3 will become a prerequisite for the Featured badge as we raise the security bar for the extensions we offer in the store.
• In June 2023, the Chrome Web Store will no longer allow publishing Manifest V2 items with visibility set to Public. The visibility of all existing Manifest V2 elements with visibility set to Public will change to Hidden at that time.
• In January 2024, after the Manifest V2 Enterprise Policy expires, the Chrome Web Store will remove all remaining Manifest V2 items from the store.

We’re getting into a bit of a quagmire here, where Google isn’t very clear on when they’ll end Manifest V2-based extensions, but apparently it gave them an extra year of life, or at least six months for regular users. They will not be publicly visible from June 2023 and business support will be removed in January 2024.

Adding to the apparent postponement of the end of the Manifesto V2 cycle company announcement to improve Manifest V3 and incorporate changes based on feedback received from the community and developers. Does this mean a fix from Google? When you know how society spends them, you have to be very brave to answer in the affirmative.

These changes in plans to end Manifest V2 sound like an attempt by Google to play for time, but don’t get your hopes up because Manifest V3 will eventually win out and fully replace the previous version of the specification.

Manifesto V3’s rejection is a theme that comes from afar. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said of her in 2021 that “still hurts privacy, security and innovation” after Google introduced a number of changes, while Opera, Vivaldi and Brave announced that they would keep the main Manifest V2 features that will (at least for now) be removed in the third version of the specification. For its part, Mozilla has announced that it will adopt Manifesto V3, but in its own way, so as not to harm blockers.

We’ll see how events unfold. The most worrying thing here is the location chrome in general and Chrome in particular. The latter is by far the most used web browser in the world and the former is the most used when it comes to work derivative browsers that will have to be seen to what extent they can withstand Google’s decisions. That leaves Firefox as the only real alternative with Safari permission not officially offered outside of Apple.

Google already had to back down with the controversial FLoC, a good idea that should have been very poorly executed for obvious reasons (that everything would revolve around the interests of the company), and although it leaves the door open to hope that With Manifest V3 , the wisest thing to do with this topic is to be bears.