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?
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...
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
“Unmitigated shitshow” is the only thing that comes to mind today.
What tech giveth, tech taketh away.
Google = unreliable as business partners and more shitty every day anyway.
Honestly, I would say it's more "what tech giveth, greed taketh away."
> 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
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.
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.
They will try again in a year, and there will be less opposition (because people get tired of fighting etc.), and this will happen
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.
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.