What an unmitigated disaster. Anyone who has been following the MV3 transition saw this coming from a mile away. When I wrote the MV3 chapter for "Building Browser Extensions", it was nearly impossible to commit to any content because there was so little clarity or direction.
I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill, but given the state of things, who has any confidence in what the future of browser extensions holds?
Note that Google's collection doesn't seem to include all of their extensions. For example, they are missing Google Voice, Google Dictionary, Send from Gmail, Page Analytics, Google Tone, Chrome Web Store Launcher, RSS Subscription Extension, Google Scholar Button, IBA Opt-out, Google Mail Checker, Google Similar Pages, Endpoint Verification, Chrome Remote Desktop, Chromebook Recovery Utility, Certificate Enrollment for Chrome OS, Screen Reader, Print, Google Docs Offline, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Google extensions that I missed in my search. Some of them have been abandoned for a number of years.
Also, this site [1] has been tracking Manifest V3 migration, but I think they might be incorrectly including Apps and Themes in their counts (I believe the 180K figure represents all of the items on the store [2]) which might be throwing off the numbers a bit.
Im afraid this statistic wont tell you the whole picture because there are things strictly prohibited/not supported by v3. 100% v3 will simply mean all the extensions using those APIs simply got deleted and no longer exist.
Firefox and Safari are continuing to support HTML pages to run the background code in rather than forcing developers to use service workers with no DOM access.
I don't think the best practices are necessarily the requirements for the featured badge. Manifest V3 is not yet a requirement for being featured, for example look at the listing for uBlock Origin, which still uses Manifest V2.
Eh, before the post in OP, I believe the timeline was June 2023 MV2 extensions go unlisted and January 2024 they get deleted. People do procrastinate but we're still far from 2/3 being "broken".
It was inevitable to delay the rollout, the adoption of Manifest V3 is way too low among the most popular extensions. Take a look at the various featured categories on the Chrome Web Store, only a small fraction of featured extensions have migrated to Manifest V3. In 3 weeks all of them would have had to be removed from those promotion pages and the Chrome Web Store would have been in ruins.
The deprecation timeline is too aggressive considering that Manifest V3 is still missing important features, so many developers have decided to brace for impact, even if it meant losing the Featured badge for their extensions in January 2023.
I’ve seen Google deprecate a dozen products I’ve used. They all follow the same pattern:
1) Deprecation announced with shut down date
2) 1-2 months before the day, they’ll send an email saying the shut down is delayed by 3-12 months
3) Repeat steps 1-2 until enough people have migrated away
The same thing will happen with Google Analytics, scheduled to be disabled July 2023. There’s no way Google will turn off millions of Analytics (GA3) accounts in 6 months when their replacement product (GA4) is so inferior.
I was a really big stadia fan. Controller and dozens of games. Hundreds of hours in game. Everyone said it was going to shit down and I did believe them but said no way they would leave us hanging. Got every penny back from them. So at least with stadia the few that believed in them made out with free gaming over the last years (and a free useless controller)
I wont mention what company, but where I work we've spent about 6 months now with an entire dev team hammering their heads against a wall trying to port our extension to MV3, because the alternative was to lose it entirely at the deadline.
Hacks, workarounds, bad docs, and lately, Google pops up to tell us OSD is kinda sorta a thing you can use, but clearly it's at a basically alpha level of maturity. This latest announcement might seem like a reprieve, but it's even worse than before for us, because now it's clear that OSD is a temporary measure, and now we have promises to fix the actual issues in the future.
As a manager I have no idea how to proceed. Do we solider ahead with OSD like we planned? Wait for them to fix the core issues? We have so little trust in Google fixing things, and a great deal of confidence in them making things worse at this point. If we commit to OSD we might be looking at doing the same level of work again, when they fix the core issues and deprecate it. If we wait for core fixes, we might not get the work done before a nebulous future deadline that could drop on us at any moment.
Google has caused us to burn an absolutely incredible amount of time and money with this. Believe me, we're are footing the bill, and have been for some time now.
Doesn’t matter. The only people who take Google seriously now are the people who took IBM seriously yesterday.
Google isn’t the CIA or NSA. They don’t have that kind of staying power because they don’t have any guiding principle beyond profit (for better or for worse).
Google dominates search, browsers, and mobile operating systems. CIA and NSA inly wished they had this (well, thanks to CLOUD Act they do, through Google and others).
People not taking Google seriously is precisely why all this shit like Manifest V3 is happening.
Chrome without ad blocking will quickly drop from the top spot.
As for search: Google has been watering down search for years trying to make it "understand" human speech. This has been a failure and not ChatGPT exists that can actually (apparently) understand english and replies in English too. It's an excellent first pass to get me the information I'm after. The responses from ChatGPT leapfrog me over the first 4-5 rounds of Google searches and right to the point where simple 1-2 word searches on google/bing can get me across the finish line.
I think that the viewpoint is that no dominator lasts forever. Not so weird then.
I think that we had two or three browsers be the dominator already and then going away.
I suppose Google gets a tiny bit of credit for not jamming MV3 through and leaving developers with the bill, but given the state of things, who has any confidence in what the future of browser extensions holds?