Reverting to Manifest v2
Ranting...
After months of frustration and hacks and workarounds I'm forced to abandon my Manifest v3 ambitions.
I began developing in February and started with v3 thinking that it was best to get ahead of the curve. Service Workers is the correct direction for Chromium so it wasn't too hard to get on board.
Not related directly, but Firebase is not Service Worker compatible, discovered this late in the game. So hacking and workarounds were required. With some some reasonable success.
So now that I'm nearly ready to launch and I'm discovering significant gating stability issues in my app. So more weeks of head scratching led me to these two:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1152255
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024211#c8
Service Workers in v3 just don't work! The whole reason for it is obviated by the fact that it has a 5 minute kill switch and is full of bugs.
My Particular Bug: When my popup is displayed for the first time the Service Worker stops responding to new Connections from content scripts.
...ending Rant.
Anyway, has anyone had success recently getting a New v2 Extension Approved? Is the Store forcing v3 for all new extensions?
Yeah, I'm completely avoiding MV3 until they actually require you to switch. Seems like they haven't actually thought everything through yet — they should have labeled it beta.
MV2 is still totally fine to use and will be approved as normal.
Yeah will probably be another year anyways. They haven't even released a deprecation timeline yet last time I checked. So we should be good for a while.
Thank you for sharing this. I've started converting my weather extension to V3 and have run into some issues. Hoping they make some changes to make it easier to switch.
MV3 feels like an emergency change based off of feedback that chrome is slow and insecure...
I tried to migrate with very simple extension that does very little in the background; so should have been simple. WRONG! I can't translate text between languages because i18n API is not supported in v3. THe solution to addressing this is currently "write your own implementation", sorry I refuse. This is very basic feature, all extensions have text, they need to add support for it natively.
A Xoogler just posted some of their internal commentary... this one stands out:
https://goomics.net/50/
I published my extension about a month ago. The whole extension was based on Firebase, so I had to use V2. It worked!!
oof! I can imagine the frustration. I'm actively working on a Chrome Extension that requires v3, primarily to use the
chrome.tabGroupsAPI.I've been skeptical about the move to Service Workers, immediately when I enabled V3,
webpack-extension-reloaderstopped working for me. So I lost hot reload, that was a sad day.Needless to say, many developers have not been happy with the move. I'm curious what's Safari's approach now that they are adopting a standardized approach to extension APIs