Google outlined on June 3, the start of the support process to stop the second version of the Chrome manifesto, which determines the capabilities and resources available for additions written using the API WebEXTENSIONS. Initially, it was planned to stop support for the second version of the manifesto in January 2023, but then the terms of several times. Starting from June 3, in the branches of Chrome Beta, DEV, and Canary, in the presence of established additions using the second version of the manifesto, a notification with information on the imminent termination of support for additions will begin to show on the chrome://Extensions page. From additions based on the second version of the manifesto, the “recommended” label will also be removed.
Subsequently, a gradual process of turning off the additions using the second version of the manifesto will begin, and users will display recommendations for installing alternatives available to Chrome Web Store, which have switched to the third version of the manifesto. At the same time, for some time, the user will be given the possibility of returning the disabled additions, but over time this functionality will be removed. Realized with the support of support for the second version of the manifesto, changes will first be applied to Chrome test branches (Beta, DEV, and Canary), but in the following months will also affect stable issues. They plan to complete the departure from the second version of the manifesto before next year. Corporate users will be given the opportunity to delay the termination of support for the second version of the manifesto until June 2025.
It is noted that Google last year eliminated all the main problems that interfered with the transition to the third version of the manifesto and took into account the wishes in its functionality. For example, in the API DeclarativeNetrequest, the permissible number of static rules has been increased to 330 thousand, and dynamic to 30 thousand. Currently, in the Chrome Web Store catalog, about 85% of additions are already supporting the third version of the manifesto, including popular additions for filtering content like Adblock Plus, Ublock Origin, and Adguard.
The third version of the Chrome manifesto has been developed with the initiative to simplify the creation of safe and high-performance additions, and complicating the possibility of creating unsafe and slow additions. The main dissatisfaction with the third version of the manifesto is caused by transferring to the regime only for reading the API webrequest, which allowed to connect their own processors that have full access to network requests and capable of modifying traffic on the fly. Instead of API Webrequest, in the third version of the manifesto, the API declarativeNetrequest is used.