Manifest V2: The Future
Added 2025-03-25 17:15:18 +0000 UTCI recently looked at the Manifest V2 support code and determined the following timeline for Google Chrome, standard Chromium and most other Chromium browsers:
Manifest V2 deprecation has five stages:
Stage 1: Business as usual, no warnings at all -> Supermium is here
Stage 2: Provide warnings to users about enabled Manifest V2 extensions
Stage 3: Start disabling users' Manifest V2 extensions, requiring the user to re-enable them. Disable them for random users until eventually all users are in this stage -> Chrome is here
Stage 4: Disable all Manifest V2 extensions permanently for non-enterprise users
Stage 5: Disable and remove Manifest V2 support
Chrome is set to complete Stage 3 in version 135, to be released in April. There is no exact timeline for when Stage 4 will be enacted, but it will likely be in version 137 or 138 (June or July).
However, even standard Chrome users will be able to enable Manifest V2 using the feature flag (in chrome:\\flags) named #extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-unsupported. This is going to be removed in version 138, to be released in July.
After that, some limited support for enterprise users and developers (using unpacked extensions) will continue until the release of version 140 in September; this can be controlled with either the ExtensionManifestV2Availability enterprise policy or the #allow-legacy-mv2-extensions feature flag.
But none of the above will apply to the users of Supermium. Manifest V2 will continue to function normally.
