Google faced an uphill battle back in 2019 when it first announced Manifest V3, the next version of its Manifest system – an underlying necessity that makes extensions work securely. Ad blockers weren’t too thrilled with the new version, but with V3 phasing in soon, it sounds like extensions like uBlock Origin will be safe.
That’s the context we go into with the update to the Manifest at least, which is said to focus primarily on extension security, with support for code hosted elsewhere essentially being removed. Since November 2023, Google has been keen on phasing out Manifest V2 extension support on Chrome and directing developers to abide by the V3 rules, with V3 to completely replace V2 come 2025.
“We’ve always been clear that the goal of Manifest V3 is to protect existing functionality while improving the security, privacy, performance and trustworthiness of the extension ecosystem as a whole. We appreciate the collaboration and feedback from the community that has allowed us – and continues to allow us – to constantly improve the extensions platform,” Google said.
With the latest update to its plan for V3, Chrome is ready to roll, starting in June. V2 will start to be replaced on June 3, with warnings to be shown to developers. Enterprise-level apps will be excluded from the migration until June 2025.
It’s a very technical change without a consumer-polished features like new backgrounds and better resource optimisation, but the big changes boil down to; no more remotely-hosted code, a move to lower system resources by incorporating ‘service workers’ instead of background pages, and changes to network request access, with performance and privacy benefits.
Manifest V3 was first announced back in 2019, which was followed by developers crying foul that Chrome was killing ad blockers. Google followed this up with a blog post: “No, Chrome isn’t killing ad blockers — we’re making them safer,” Google said at the time.
Now, Google claims that AdBlock, Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin, and AdGuard all have Manifest V3 versions available, with over 85 per cent of “actively maintained extensions in the Chrome Web Store” now operating the updated version.
So the Google war on ad blockers hasn’t reached Chrome just yet. YouTube? That’s another story.
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