For several years now, Google has wanted to kill the current Chrome extension system in favor of a more restrictive one, creating further restrictions on filtering extensions that block ads and/or work to preserve user privacy. A new extension system called “Manifest V3″technically entered the stable channel in January 2021, but Chrome still supports the older and more powerful Manifest V2 system. The first steps to phase out Manifest V2 were supposed to start in January 2023, but as 9to5Google first spotted, Google now says it has delayed the mandatory transition to Manifest V3, and won’t even have a new V2 shutdown schedule until March.
The old timeline started in January 2023 when beta builds of Chrome started doing “experiments”turning off Manifest V2. This will move to stable in June, and the Chrome Web Store will ban Manifest V2 extensions in January 2024. The new timeline is that there is no timeline and each step is now listed as “pending”or “pending”.
Google’s statement only addresses the second controversial change in Manifest V3: disabling the extension’s ability to run a hidden background page due to background processing. Google wants all background processing to happen in service workers, but this is a complex environment compared to regular web development and has many other limitations. Google’s delay is only due to an attempt to fix some of these background restrictions.
Google’s post doesn’t mention filtering add-ons, so it doesn’t look like the world’s largest advertising company has changed its mind about ad blockers. The big problem for these extensions is the destruction of the “WebRequest API”, which allows ad blockers and other filtering tools to modify Chrome’s network requests on the fly. This is commonly used to create huge lists of websites (ad servers) that extensions want to block. Google has sort of thrown the bone at these extensions by creating a new API that allows you to limit the block list of URLs, but this is just a static list of 30,000 URLs, while a typical uBlock Origin installation includes 300,000 dynamic filtering rules .. Some ad blockers will try to play within these rules with Manifest V3, but Google is going to reduce their effectiveness and does not want to implement any common sense solutions that would allow them to continue to work at their current level.
“Deceitful and menacing”
Google started this mess in 2018 with a blog post outlining the “Reliable Default Chrome Extensions”plan. As part of the rollout of Manifest V3, Google’s official line is that the company wanted to cut back on the “over-wide access”given to extensions, and that a more limited extension platform would “allow for more performant”extensions. A fun side effect of all this is more limited ad blocking, which would handily help Google. The old timeline would have finally implemented a full transition to Manifest V3 six years after this initial blog post, but now it seems like it will take even longer.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation does not share Google’s promotional offering and called Manifest V3 “deceitful and threatening”about a year ago. The EFF stated that Manifest V3 “will limit what web extensions can do, especially those designed to monitor, modify, and compute along with your browser communicating with the websites you visit.”The privacy group has stated that “it’s doubtful that Mv3 will do much for security”as it only restricts the filtering of website content, not its collection, so malicious extensions can still wipe all your data. EFF also says that performance isn’t a strong excuse either, citing a studyshowing that loading and rendering ads degrades browser performance. If Google is concerned about security,
Lately, the Chrome team seems to have decided to make a difference. The group has also refused to block tracking cookies until it can first build tracking and ads into Chrome (this has also been repeatedly delayed). If people are tired of Chrome’s user-hostile changes supporting Google’s business model, there’s an alternative. Some Chromium-based forks, such as Brave and Vivaldi, have pledged to keep Manifest V2 working when Google disables it. Of course, there is always Firefox that says it will move to Manifest V3 along with Google, but will re-add the WebRequest API that filter add-ons rely on.