Google has released a timeline to retire Chrome Manifest Version XNUMX in favor of Version XNUMX, which has been criticized for breaking many of its content-blocking and security add-ons. Among other things, the popular uBlock Origin ad blocker is tied to the second version of the manifest, which cannot be transferred to the third version of the manifest due to the termination of support for the blocking mode of the webRequest API.
Starting January 17, 2022, add-ons that use the second version of the manifest will no longer be accepted into the Chrome Web Store catalog, but developers of previously added add-ons will still be able to publish updates. In January 2023, Chrome will no longer support the second version of the manifest, and all add-ons linked to it will stop working. At the same time, publishing updates for such add-ons in the Chrome Web Store will be prohibited.
Recall that in the third version of the manifest, which defines the capabilities and resources provided by the add-ons, as part of the initiative to strengthen security and privacy, the declarativeNetRequest API, which is limited in its capabilities, is proposed instead of the webRequest API. While the webRequest API allows you to connect your own handlers that have full access to network requests and are able to modify traffic on the fly, the declarativeNetRequest API only provides access to a ready-made filtering engine built into the browser, which independently processes blocking rules, does not allow you to use your own filtering algorithms and which does not allow you to set complex rules that overlap depending on the conditions.
According to Google, it continues to work on the implementation in declarativeNetRequest of the features required in add-ons that use webRequest, and intends to bring the new API to a form that fully meets the needs of developers of existing add-ons. For example, Google has already taken into account the wishes of the community and added support for the use of several static sets of rules, filtering by regular expressions, modifying HTTP headers, dynamically changing and adding rules, removing and replacing request parameters, filtering with binding to tabs and creating specific for certain rule set sessions. In the coming months, it is planned to additionally implement support for dynamically configured content processing scripts and the ability to store data in RAM.
Source: opennet.ru