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Comment by runlevel1 | Hacker News Reader

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runlevel1

I just wrote a quick script to survey extensions featured on the Chrome Web Store.

Of the 1200 checked so far:

Manifest v2: 872

Manifest v3: 328

They'd basically be breaking almost 2/3 of extensions.

EDIT: Just noticed 9 out of 12 of Google's own extensions are still on manifest v2 as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_ch...

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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.

[1]: https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration

[2]: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions

Back in my day attaching Google’s name to a product was a positive development. Remember GMail?

“Unmitigated shitshow” is the only thing that comes to mind today.

What tech giveth, tech taketh away.

This is so true. They even closed down their IoT core for pennies.

Google = unreliable as business partners and more shitty every day anyway.

It's almost like they have an incorrect corporate reward function, that their employees are then optimizing...

> What tech giveth, tech taketh away.

Honestly, I would say it's more "what tech giveth, greed taketh away."

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.

Our solution has been to uninstall Chrome. Firefox, and when unavoidable, DuckDuckGo's private browser, are doing fine.

Firefox is gonna do MV3 too except keep the request intercepting API so it’s not terribly different.

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.

Isn't one of the requirements to be featured using Manifest v3?

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/best_practices/

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.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/discovery/#featur...

> Chrome team members manually evaluate each extension before it receives the badge, paying special attention to the following:

> 1. Adherence to Chrome Web Store’s best practices

I guess it’s “evaluated” on adherence, rather than it being a hard requirement

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".

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