Manifest V2 phase-out - "short time" explanation

[Evan Cohylakis]

Hello,

I have an app that uses a manifest 2, and recently (it was yesterday) I had to manually enable it since google chrome says " This extension may soon no longer be supported "

Google also states in an article " For a short time, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on. "

I know that we need to migrate the app to manifest V3, but I dont know how much time we have.

Does anybody know how many weeks/months is "short time" for google in this case?

Thank you,
Evan

[Patrick Kettner]

Hi Evan

We have not announced that date yet 

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[Evan Cohylakis]

ok thank you Patrick. If you were to guesstimate, would that be within January of later?

[Patrick Kettner]

Honestly, I have no idea. The decision has not been finalized. I would be mildly surprised if it happened in January, but technically the code that disables them is already in Chrome, so it could happen at any time.

patrick

[woxxom]

The fact that there's no transparency for this decision is an indication that the extension platform is not really a platform for Chromium team. Can you imagine the same nonchalance toward downstream developers in the web platform? No, in the web platform there's no monopolist, so such decisions go through the "intent to deprecate" cycle with concrete milestones based on verifiable feedback/metrics that show a threshold of usage below something like 0.01%.

[Patrick Kettner]

I don’t know how to be more transparent. 

The decision hasn’t been made. If there was a decision, it would be shared. Before it went into an effect.

[woxxom]

Yet again you seem to take my criticism personally, but my message was specifically about the Chromium's team's way of mishandling the platform's deprecation cycle. There was never any transparency and when extension developers asked to clarify the concrete terms the reply each time was that there'll be no more transparency and no one can say anything concrete. This is not how a platform is maintained.

[Patrick Kettner]

Nothing being taken personally, I just literally don’t know how to be more transparent. Within the deprecation, specific dates were given in the past (“no MV2 extensions beyond 2020, etc) that were then withdrawn, that caused confusion and further erodes trust. If a specific date that was actually meaningful existed, it would be messaged. As it has been in every other step of the process. This is not an arbitrary decision being made by a handful of people. It involves executives, lawyers, engineers, and many other roles. I absolutely agree that things could have been better handled throughout this process, but at the moment the only honest and accurate answer is there isn’t currently an answer. It COULD happen today, in the sense it is technically possible. It will not plausibly happen today because it is the holiday period. 

As always, I appreciate the feedback. Truly. 

Patrick

[woxxom]

> but at the moment the only honest and accurate answer is there isn’t currently an answer

> It will not plausibly happen today because it is the holiday period.

A holiday, eh? Wow, what a "great" reason. Seems like you think this is an acceptable way to maintain a platform, but it's not. It's a way to handle a rollout of a feature, not disabling of the entire platform. The more anyone looks for normalizations of their failures (i.e. providing more transparency and precision in the context of this discussion), the less likely they will be able to do it right, which is only possible when one understands that either their approach is wrong or that there may be a possibly much better approach. There is an example of how things are done properly, it's the web platform, I gave an example of how they handle breaking changes and deprecations, which was the supposedly inspirational half of my message that could have lead to improvements in your team's methods. Instead you seemingly rejected the very idea that there's something wrong done by the team. This seems like a recurring theme specifically in the extensions team, I haven't seen it from the core browser teams (V8, Blink, Devtools) after reading thousands of messages over the past 10 years that I've been following/participating in crbug, stackoverflow, github, chromium review and groups.

[hrg...@gmail.com]

The difference with the web platform is that the MV2-to-MV3 transition removes capabilities from the platform, whereas the web platform always changes towards something more capable, not less capable.

Web developers naturally evolve towards newer and more capable web APIs. Whereas extension developers would never move from MV2 to MV3 unless we are being forced to do so. i.e. the MV2-MV3 transition could not happen voluntarily and organically.

Therefore, there's no good way to transition to MV3. Google can only force it with arbitrary deadlines.