Manifest V3 is more secure, performant, and privacy-preserving than its predecessor. It is an evolution of the extension platform that takes into consideration both the changing web landscape and the future of browser extensions.
January 17, 2022: New Manifest V2 extensions will no longer be accepted by the Chrome Web Store. Developers may still push updates to existing Manifest V2 extensions, but no new Manifest V2 items may be submitted.
January 2023: The Chrome browser will no longer run Manifest V2 extensions. Developers may no longer push updates to existing Manifest V2 extensions.
Starting in January in Chrome 112, Chrome may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels.
Starting in June in Chrome 115, Chrome may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.
For developers who still own extensions running Manifest V2, we recommend completing migration to Manifest V3 well ahead of the release of these Chrome versions because those extensions may stop working at any time following the aforementioned dates.
December 9, 2022: The Manifest V2 deprecation timelines are under review and the experiments scheduled for early 2023 are being postponed. For more information, read the update in the chromium-extensions Google Group.
we’re postponing any January experiments to turn off Manifest V2 in pre-release channels of Chrome and changes to the featured badge in the Chrome Webstore, and we'll be evaluating all downstream milestones as well. Expect to hear more about the updated phase-out plan and schedule by March of 2023. Our guiding principle will be to give developers sufficient time to update and test their extensions after the launch of these new capabilities before turning off Manifest V2.
Manifest V3 extensions can now access favicons using a new URL pattern: chrome-extension://<id>/_favicon/, where is the ID of your extension. This replaces the Manifest V2 platform's chrome://favicons API. See the Favicon API docs for more information.