Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes

Greetings extension devs,

As we head towards Manifest V3 migration, we are intently monitoring comments from the developer community to help inform our timelines. We’ve heard your feedback on common challenges posed by the migration, specifically the service worker’s inability to use DOM capabilities and the current hard limit on extension service worker lifetimes. We’re mitigating the former with the Offscreen Documents API (added in Chrome 109) and are actively pursuing a solution to the latter.

We’re committed to providing developers solutions to migration challenges with new functionality, bug fixes, and adequate time for adoption. For this reason, we’re postponing any January experiments to turn off Manifest V2 in pre-release channels of Chrome and changes to the featured badge in the Chrome Webstore, and we'll be evaluating all downstream milestones as well. Expect to hear more about the updated phase-out plan and schedule by March of 2023. Our guiding principle will be to give developers sufficient time to update and test their extensions after the launch of these new capabilities before turning off Manifest V2.

Thank you for all the feedback and passionate discussion thus far, and we wish you a happy start to 2023.

Simeon - @dotproto
Chrome Extensions DevRel

Hey everyone,

As promised, we wanted to share an update on how things are going. Over the last few months, we’ve made progress on a number of improvements based on developer community feedback, such as allowing extension events to extend a service worker’s lifetime, increasing in-memory session storage from 1 MB to 10 MB after cross-browser discussions, and adding more reasons for offscreen documents. We're continuing to improve the platform by making service workers easier to use (including more flexible lifetimes with messaging and other APIs), introducing more service worker APIs in general, and working with other browser vendors to find ways we can align our extension platforms.  

We plan to continue reviewing feedback, making changes and improving documentation to ensure the transition from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 is smooth and successful. We're still working on the timeline of the MV2 phase-out plan, so keep an eye out for it in the coming months. We will provide sufficient migration time for developers - at least 6 months of heads-up - before beginning any experiments to turn off MV2 in the browser next year.

We remain committed to the rollout of MV3 to improve security, privacy, and performance for our users around the world. We also want to ensure that we phase out MV2 in a timely manner, and we’re continuing to listen to feedback from the developer community to help inform our improvements and timelines.

Thanks for your patience while we continue to work on moving the extensions ecosystem forward in a way that supports the needs of users and developers.

Chrome Extensions Team