Following the company’s decision to delay their removal from the Chrome Web Store until January 2024, Google Chrome extensions will continue to be supported for one more year for enterprise use.
The post on the Google Chrome Developers blog promises a moratorium on significant modifications to the Chromium engine, which privacy campaigners claim could cripple browser add-ons that are intended to block adverts.
However, no such relief is being given to personal Chrome users, who Google claims will be subject to the temporary phase-out of extensions based on the current Manifest V2 (MV2) API in a series of “experiments” starting in 2019.
updates to Google Chrome‘s API in stages
Businesses will have more time under the new enterprise policy to implement extensions that are essential to their workflow, but Google Chrome extension creators will have less time to prepare for the browser’s adoption of the Manifest V3 (MV3) API.
In an effort to “raise the security standard” for the platform, Google said it will stop highlighting MV2 extensions on the Chrome Web Store as of January 2023.
After that, MV2 extensions won’t be possible to be published with their visibility set to public after June 2023. Extensions that are already listed as public on the shop will be delisted. This is a particularly egregious alteration because it makes them unfindable to new users while maintaining their enterprise functionality.
Google is also cautioning developers that even after the release of new Chrome versions next year, their MV2 extensions might still stop functioning at “any time.”
Additionally, Chrome 112 will permit the progressive phase-out of Manifest V2 in Canary, Dev, and Beta versions of the browser starting in January 2022. While the most widely used version of Chrome, Stable, will be able to phase off MV2 starting in June thanks to Chrome 115.
WebRequest, an API that is essential for restricting web content like adverts and will be removed by Chrome’s implementation of MV3, is at the centre of the issue.
Following the modifications, the creators of Mozilla Firefox have declared their plan to continue using WebRequest while implementing MV3.
