Google has been working to slowly migrate the Google Chrome browser toward its newer Chrome Extensions platform known as Manifest V3. This allows the company to focus on newer extension techniques and features that focus on security, performance, modern API use, and more. It also deprecates or prepares to deprecate various features that have been in use with the older Manifest V2 platform. These efforts have been slowly in effect over the last so many years.
The move has been slow since V3 places a lot of restrictions on developers when it comes to what extensions have access to or are able to achieve. There is a lot of conflict within various communities and other browsers when it comes to how on-board they are with the idea.
One of the biggest concerns is that it will significantly affect the capabilities of certain filtering tools like ad-blockers. Potentially ruling many of them out as usable extensions in some cases. This is part of a major push by Google to limit ad-blocking techniques. Likely because it is moving further away from protecting users and more toward protecting its own revenue since the company depends so heavily on ad revenue throughout its portfolio.
An example of this is YouTube (owned by Google), who is starting to crack down hard on ad-blockers. It has been using various techniques to get around these extensions. With its latest efforts focusing more aggressive techniques that go as far as muting videos or immediately skipping to the end of a video so users are unable to view it unless they disable their ad-blocker.
Now Google is pushing toward a complete deprecation of Manifest V2 extensions. This means that a number of the extensions you make use of may cease to function or maybe even forcibly uninstall due to incompatibility once you update the browser to whatever version will be enforcing this. Unless the developer of the extension upgrades it to a Manifest V3 release, it will no longer be compatible. With some plugins dropping completely if V3 doesn’t support their needs/practices.
Ad-blocking extensions will continue to exist, but they won’t be able to update their rules/definitions on the fly, forcing them to release a new updated version of the extension every time these rules need updating. Which could take a long time to get through the approval process at times. This can critically hurt the effectiveness of these plugins as advertisers can switch methods or upgrade their own techniques much faster than the extensions will be able to keep up with through updates.
As for the developers that have abandoned their extensions or haven’t released an update in a decent amount of time, unless they act quickly to bring those extensions up to speed, they will be lost in this move. So how do you know which ones you have installed could potentially be affected? How do you know which are V2 and which are V3?
Here’s how to find out!
- Open a Chrome browser window and paste this into the URL field: chrome://extensions-internals/
- Search for “manifest_version“
- Look for anything that doesn’t list “3” to the right of this line
Each of the extensions within this window that state “2” instead of “3” are potentially going to be affected by the change. I just did this myself, and of course, the following extensions fall under “2”: AdGuard AdBlocker, Stylus, Tampermonkey, EditThisCookie, and Text Blaze. As well as a number of outdated (but secure, for now) names.
The extensions I listed have the ability to modify the content on the page. Either by detecting and removing ads so they do not display, or adjusting various elements of the page such as color themes, and more. These allow you to deeply dial in your web browsing experience and I personally use them for an ad-free experience that loads many of my favorite websites with a “dark theme” since my eyes prefer this over bright pages.
The last of the extensions I listed (Text Blaze) simply allows you to right-click into fields to insert text templates/snippets so you don’t have to retype commonly used phrases into certain fields. Speeding up my productivity for the 4-5 things I have listed in there (just something personal I like to use). In addition to these, there were 8 other extensions that were simply old and haven’t been updated in a long time. Their code is still secure and doesn’t contain any known vulnerabilities so I keep them around for now. But they will likely be lost whenever Google decides to update.
You can also opt to switch to a different browser like Firefox, but many of today’s browsers are based on Chromium (a Google project that Chrome is also based on). So who knows how long it will be before Google finds a way to force all of those browsers to do the same. For now, it sounds like Chrome is the only browser interested in making this move.
Another move you can take is to replace content-blocking (ads, dangerous websites, etc) extensions with network-wide solutions. Allowing you to block ads on the network level so that they don’t even exist by the time they reach your browser. There are a few routers out there that feature block lists for ads, websites, and services. But most of the time you’ll have to seek out a hardware-driven firewall solution that is either purchased or self-hosted (using open-source solutions like pfsense). Or, you can host a simple PiHole server on a mini PC or Raspberry Pi (using that as your personal DNS).
