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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Chrome suddenly reported “Unsupported extensions” – need to find a Chromium browser that will long-time support Manifest V2

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/14

Chrome warned me of a list of extensions that it thought were unsupported pointing me towards [Wayback/Archive] Install and manage extensions – Chrome Web Store Help: Unsupported extensions.

It included ones important to me like [Wayback/Archive] Pushbullet – Chrome Web Store and [Wayback/Archive] ClearURLs – Chrome Web Store.

My full local list was at the bottom of chrome://extensions/ where you have to both “keep it” to get them re-installed in the “This extension was turned off because it is no longer supported” state, and after keeping them switch them on plus conforming the switch on to be able to use them.

A quick search revealed this likely has to do with Manifest V2 support: [Wayback/Archive] Why is my Chrome saying the Pushbullet Extension is no longer supported? : PushBullet (that post was 9 months ago, so it looks Chrome is spreading the nagging period over a long time).

This means I need to find a Chromium based browser that plans to support Manifest V2 for a long time. For now Brave indicates that it wants to: [Wayback/Archive] What Manifest V3 means for Brave Shields and the use of extensions in the Brave browser | Brave

Some however think Brave won’t: [Wayback/Archive] If it’s chromium based, they will need to remove manifest v2 at some point… | Hacker News

Brave supports it right now, which is 2 months after it’s been removed upstream.

I strongly suspect they’re gonna drop support as soon as the first bigger merge issue happens along with a heartfelt blog that “they did they everything to support it, but it was just too much for the resources available to them”
I doubt it’s gonna take more then 1-2 years (December 2027) for this to happen, but we will see.

Microsoft Edge is out (besides having an obnoxious exit system in the main menu not reacting to as last week it started turning off support for Manifest V2: [Wayback/Archive] Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge | Hacker News (somewhere in the middle is the above Brave comment).

Firefox is out for a few reasons:

  1. Bad treatment of personnel, for instance: [Wayback/Archive] Mozilla has fired Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira after cancer diagnosis : firefox
  2. Asynchronous input handling causing a lot of key (and likely mouse) processing issues with regards to timing (gets far worse when your system is under stress)
  3. Input being processed on multiple input elements at the same time
  4. Missing keyboard shortcuts to access the bookmarks bar
  5. Licensing controversy about selling data combined with [Wayback/Archive] The Firefox I loved is gone – how to protect your privacy on it now | ZDNET

    Others have noticed that Mozilla’s new executives, including Varma, come not from promotion within or the open-source community, but from money-making businesses. Varma’s last job, for example, was at Meta, where he was responsible for monetizing WhatsApp.

  6. “Firefox Beta” Your location data is now shared with third parties for advertising or marketing” screenshot: [Wayback/Archive] Post by gemma lynn, @ello@void.ello.tech
    Android screenshot: Data sharing updates for location These apps have changed the way they may share your location data. They may not have shared it before, or may now share it for advertising or marketing purposes: Firefox Beta Your location data is now shared with third parties for advertising or marketing

    Android screenshot: Data sharing updates for location These apps have changed the way they may share your location data. They may not have shared it before, or may now share it for advertising or marketing purposes: Firefox Beta Your location data is now shared with third parties for advertising or marketing

Mozilla reverting 5 and 6 is part of the problem: them even thinking of doing the original changes is enough to distrust them for the foreseeable future..

Related: enabling Manifest V2 until about June 2025

  • [Wayback/Archive] Manifest V2 support timeline  |  Chrome Extensions  |  Chrome for Developers: June 2025: Chrome MV2 deprecation enterprise rolloutlink
    Enterprises using the ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy to ensure the continued functioning of Manifest V2 extensions in their organization will have one additional year – until June 2025 – to migrate the Manifest V2 extensions in their organization. Browsers with the policy enabled won’t be impacted by the rollout of the deprecation until that time.
  • [Wayback/Archive] Chromium-based browser with manifest-v2 support and own extension store : browsers
  • [Wayback/Archive] Tutorial – Extend Manifest V2 – “ExtensionManifestV2Availability” Chrome Policy : chrome
  • [Wayback/Archive] Download Chrome CRXs and analyze Chrome extensions | Chrome-Stats
  • [Wayback/Archive] Tutorial on how to Enable Manifest V2 extensions for another year (until June 2025) such as Ublock Origin on Windows using the registry editor (regedit) : chrome

    another easy way of enabling with less regedit fiddling is to create a .reg file with this in it. Simply open up notepad and paste this bit of code and save it as a .reg file and double click it.

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome]
"ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002

    Edit: Courtesy of /u/cat-machine here is how you enable it on MacOS, I can’t verify if this works, but I’ll add it to the main post for making it more accessible

    Open terminal.app and paste one of the following:

    Chrome

    defaults write com.google.Chrome.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Chrome Beta

    defaults write com.google.Chrome.beta.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Brave

    defaults write com.brave.Browser.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Brave Beta

    defaults write com.brave.Browser.beta.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    EDIT: Google has changed the internal address of the policy viewer and it’s now “chrome://policy”. instead of “chrome://policies”, I already edited the post above to correct this

    …

    In powershell: right click on start menu, powershell as admin, then run this:

    $path = "registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome"; New-Item $path -Force; Set-ItemProperty $path -Name ExtensionManifestV2Availability -Value 2

    …

    For users on MacOS, you can also enable this policy preference.
    Open terminal.app and paste one of the following:

    Arc
    defaults write company.thebrowser.Browser.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Chrome
    defaults write com.google.Chrome.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Chrome Beta
    defaults write com.google.Chrome.beta.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Brave
    defaults write com.brave.Browser.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Brave Beta
    defaults write com.brave.Browser.beta.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Edge
    defaults write com.microsoft.Edge.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Edge Beta
    defaults write com.microsoft.Edge.Beta.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    Vivaldi
    defaults write com.vivaldi.Vivaldi.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    …

    Mac Edge users (both of us) can use this:

    defaults write com.microsoft.Edge.plist ExtensionManifestV2Availability -int 2

    …

    For those on Windows, Gibson Research (maker of the excellent SpinRite disk optimizer/recovery utiity) have a Windows registry file that you can apply. Open the link, download it and open it with RegEdit:

    https://grc.sc/v2 [Wayback]

    And thank you for the Mac command – I just ran it and verified it was applied using:

    chrome://policy

  • [Wayback/Archive] Manifest V2 phase-out begins : uBlockOrigin posted in 2024:
    1. June 3rd, users will start being informed that their MV2 extensions will soon stop to function. And uBO (and others) will lose the “Featured” badge.
    2. The extensions will be then gradually disabled in the “coming months”, with the last deadline being the beginning of next year. Will uBO last that long? Probably not. Safer to think 1-3 months, IMO.
    3. By enabling enterprise policy ExtensionManifestV2Availability, you should be able to extend support till June 2025.

Query: [Wayback/Archive] chrome Pushbullet Unsupported Extension – Google Search

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2025/03/14 at 18:00 and is filed under Chrome, Chrome, Chromium, Google, Power User, Web Browsers. Tagged: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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