Official: Chrome Manifest V2 phase out is paused!

We have received some good news from the Chrome extension developer relations team today. All previously communicated Manifest V2 phase out dates are put on-hold. The Chrome extensions team is reacting to mounting developer dissatisfaction with the Manifest V3 model and non-existent workarounds for common V2 capabilities. Chrome team’s current plan is to iteratively ship features that unblock migration to V3 manifest and then resume V2 phase out plan.

Biggest migration blockers right now:

• In progress: Missing DOM capabilities in Service Worker
  • This is being mitigated by introducing Offscreen documents API (Chrome 109)
• Unresolved: Hard limits on Service Worker lifetime

It’s important to note that this is just a pause in the timeline. You should still be actively looking into migrating to manifest V3. Moreover, it shows that the Chrome team is listening, so don’t hesitate to share your migration blockers in the chromium-extensions Google Group. Updates on new migration milestones are expected by March 2023.