This is the Manifest V3 migration plan announced by Google last year:

• From January 17, 2022, the Chrome Web Store will no longer accept new extensions built using the Manifest V2 method, but updates to existing extensions can still be submitted.
• A year later, in January 2023, the Chrome browser will no longer support the Manifest V2 extension, and no longer support updates.

In September of this year, Chrome made a small change to this timetable, changing it from no longer supporting the Manifest V2 extension in January 2023 to officially launching this phase-out plan.

The time has come to December 2022. At this node, which is less than a month away from implementing this change, Google announced that it will postpone the transition from Manifest V2 to V3 again.

Judging from the new schedule above, Google originally planned to stop supporting Manifest V2 in the Canary, Dev and Beta versions of Chrome from January 2023, and now the latest status is from January 2023, Modified to defer.

It was originally planned that Chrome will turn off support for the Manifest V2 extension in all versions (including stable versions, except for enterprise policies) in June 2023, and the current status is now under review.

It was originally planned that Google will delete all remaining Manifest V2 items from the Chrome Web Store after the expiration of the Manifest V2 enterprise policy in January 2024, and completely stop running Manifest V2 extensions. The current status has also been changed to under review.

As for the reason for the delay, Simeon Vincent, who is in charge of developer relations for Chrome extensions, said:

We’ve heard developer feedback on common challenges associated with migration, specifically the inability of Service Worker APIs to use DOM features, and the current hard limits on Service Worker lifecycles that are too restrictive. We’re mitigating the former with the Offscreen Documents API (added in Chrome 109), and actively pursuing a solution for the latter.

Based on the above reasons, Google decided to postpone the plan to disable the extension of Manifest V2. At the same time, it is also reconsidering its timetable for further changes, and will provide more information in March next year. The goal is to give developers enough information before disabling Manifest V2. Time to update and test their extensions.

According to chrome-stats.com, of the approximately 170,000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store, only about 30,000 are currently transitioning from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3.

This means that only about 17.9% of all extensions in the store were migrated. Even many of the extensions developed by Google themselves haven’t converted yet. If Google disables Manifest V2 as previously planned, most extensions will stop working.