V3 is here.
Google's 2018 announcement of the transition to manifest V3 for Chrome extensions sent shockwaves through the web development community, particularly among power users and professionals who rely heavily on a suite of extensions to enhance their browsing experience and productivity. After numerous delays and changes in timeline, Google has officially started deprecating manifest V2 extensions.
Google began phasing out manifest V2 in June of 2024. According to the official timeline, Google has begun notifying users of extensions that will be automatically removed. However, in the coming months Google will be no longer notify users and instead will automatically uninstall extensions that still rely on manifest V2.
What's changing?
Manifest V3, the new extension framework, promises to bring a host of changes that aim to improve security and user privacy. However, these changes have also raised concerns about the future viability of many popular extensions that currently utilize the existing manifest V2 standard.
One of the most significant changes in manifest V3 is the deprecation of the "blocking webRequest" API, which has been a cornerstone for many ad-blocking and content-filtering extensions. This API allowed extensions to intercept and modify web requests, enabling them to effectively block unwanted content. With manifest V3, this capability will be significantly reduced, potentially rendering many of these extensions less effective or even obsolete.
How does V2 affect recruiting professionals?
For professionals who have built their workflows around a carefully curated set of extensions, this transition poses a significant challenge. These users often rely on a combination of productivity-boosting, task-automating, and information-organizing extensions to streamline their daily tasks. The prospect of losing access to these tools, or having them function in a diminished capacity, can be a major disruption to their productivity and efficiency.
When writing this blog post we tested the ten most popular recruiting extensions for email and phone enrichment. Of the ten extensions tested, eight of them are still relying on manifest V2.
What about Nymeria's browser extension?
Manifest V3 is more secure, provides better privacy, and has a more transparent permission system. That is why we have been using manifest V3 since 2021.
When manifest V3 was announced we rebuilt our extension from the ground up. We designed our extension to be unobtrusive and keep permissions to the bare minimum. We have explained all of our permissions in a previous blog post.
Our extension was also carefully designed to minimize exposure to unwanted data exfiltration and surveillance. In 2019 we wrote about LinkedIn's data exfiltration and browser fingerprinting techniques. LinkedIn has used those techniques to identify extension users and restrict their accounts. The Nymeria extension was designed to not be fingerprinted by such techniques.
We are unsure how many extensions will be impacted by Manifest V3, but you can rest assured the Nymeria extension is here to stay. We hope this post has shed some light on Google's updated timeline and as always if you have any questions about any of this please reach out anytime!