PSA: Google Chrome 149 will be the last version fully supporting MV2 and Blocking WebRequest on regular extension installs

[bershanskiy]

This is not a specification question or standards discussion, I just think that WECG might find these news interesting.

Google Chrome team just started removing the flags responsible for MV2 availability in Google Chrome. Specifically, here is a copy of message from Devlin:

MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won't be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we've actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.

Unfortunately, we won't be putting code behind a compilation flag ... We won't be removing all the MV2 code wholesale right away, so many of these things will continue working for awhile (but they will go away eventually, and some may go away sooner than others).

I can certainly understand the desire to keep using these extensions, and IIRC, many of the Chromium forks plan to continue supporting MV2 indefinitely.

Chromium 150 lost kExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag and will not be able to install MV2 extensions from Chrome Web Store. In Google Chrome, Blocking WebRequest permission is available only to MV2 extensions or policy-installed extensions. Users will still be able to load extensions in debug mode via "allow legacy MV2 extensions" flag. Other Chromium-based browsers will be able to relatively trivially continue support for MV2 and blocking WebRequest, at least for now.

[dotproto]

For the sake of visibility, I suggest we leave this issue open for, say, 3 weeks and then archive it. I've also added it to tomorrow's agenda (#998).