Ron Amadeo
The lengthy project of implementing a new browser extension platform for Google Chrome looks set to actually come to fruition after six years of careful work.
As Bleeping Computer points out, the issue first appears when using uBlock Origin, a popular ad-blocking extension. Recently, Chrome users have been seeing a warning that “This extension may soon no longer be supported,” along with a link asking them to “remove or replace it with a similar extension” from the Chrome Web Store. If you visit Chrome’s extensions page (chrome://extensions), you may see a similar warning for some extensions.
What’s happening is that Chrome is preparing to require Manifest V3 for extensions to run on its platform. The final announcement about Manifest V3, first announced in 2018, was that V2 extensions would begin to be gradually released in early June to the Beta, Dev, and Canary update channels. Google said that users can manually re-enable V2 extensions for a “short period,” but “over time, this toggle will be removed.” The transition for enterprise Chrome deployments is expected to be delayed until June 2025.
Google says the new extension platform was built to “improve the security, privacy, performance, and reliability of the extension ecosystem.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is most vocal on the security aspect, stating that Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, intends to support V3 extensions for cross-browser compatibility, but has no plans to drop support for V2 extensions, suggesting that they are unlikely to see significant improvements.
Perhaps the biggest friction point is ad blockers, with Google stating in an explanatory blog post that “we’re not eliminating ad blockers, we’re making them safer.” Google noted in November 2023 that Manifest V3 allows for more content blocking rules in extensions, especially ad blockers, and allows them to be updated more dynamically.
But one of the biggest changes is a ban on “remotely hosted code,” which includes the filtering lists that ad blockers update regularly. Ad blockers that want to update their filtering lists in response to pivots on platforms like Google’s YouTube or ad servers will have to do so through the Chrome Web Store review process. Ad blocker coders see this as intentional gatekeeping and slowdowns.
Google had announced that 85 percent of actively maintained extensions in the store had Manifest V3 versions available before it began its initial work towards V3 in May. Raymond Hill wrote on uBlock Origin’s GitHub page on Friday that there won’t be a full version of uBlock Origin that works with Manifest V3, but instead there will be a “Lite” version that’s “a stripped-down version of uBO that has done its best to convert the filter lists used by uBO to a Manifest V3 compliant approach.”