Manifest V2 is a specification for Chrome browser extensions.

Chrome fans have known for a long time that Manifest V2 was about to be replaced by Manifest V3, and that V2's final day was approaching fast.

Four days ago, I learned on HN that V2's end had almost arrived. And now, for my Chromebook, the beginning of the end for Manifest V2 actually happened today!

This afternoon I updated my Chromebook from Chrome OS version 133.0.6943.132 to Chrome OS version 133.0.6943.146. After rebooting, I saw the above screenshot.

For now, at least, it was easy to re-enable the V2 extensions I use all the time. All I had to do was click the Manage Extensions link shown in the above screenshot, go to the Manage Extensions page, and re-enable the extensions.

Apparently I didn't need it today, but, as explained by Raymond Hill (gorhill, the author of uBlock Origin), an alternative method to extend Manifest V2 to June 2025 is provided through this Chromium Enterprise policy.

The most common issue with the Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 transition probably is the disabling of uBlock
Origin. But, for me, and for others also facing significant vision-related challenges, the end of Chrome's High Contrast Extension is a significant loss. I also will miss SwitchyOmega's ability to quickly enable my web proxy.

While reading the above linked HN discussion, I decided to try Brave browser on Android. For a while I have used Firefox Nightly as an alternative to Chrome. While there seems to be a lot of customization possible in Firefox's dark mode, the default seems to be lower contrast grey text, while Brave uses white text as the default in "night mode." Additionally, Brave's AI search page has two inputs, one to continue in context and the other for an unrelated aside. This double input approach seems handy to me. Firefox seems to want to keep the tab bar at the bottom, but Brave allows tab manipulation to be controlled in the top bar.

Another positive point for Brave is that the design of the Brave Lion logo somehow reminds me of a Yeti! Having a Yeti or a Lion always standing guard, watching my back -- it makes me feel safe!

Besides trying Brave, another possibility for me is moving away from Chromebooks as my daily driver. Maybe I could do equally well running NetBSD or Alpine or Debian locally.

I hope this post is useful to others here who also have lost or might very soon lose Manifest V2.

For a while Business Casual has been installed at https://bcas.metalvps.com. The savory coffee beans image used to display on my older Chromebook, but, sadly, the image seems to have stopped displaying at or before Chrome Version 115.0.5790.160 (Official Build) on a newer Duet 5 Chromebook.

Chrome Devtools on the Duet 5 Chromebook shows both that the image downloaded successfully and that the image is not rendered.

The yummy coffee beans still display on Firefox Nightly version 115.0a1 and on Safari version 13.1.2 on a mid-2011 MacBook Air running Mac OS version 10.13.6 High Sierra. The lovely coffee beans also still display just fine on mobile, ZTE ZMax Pro z981, both Firefox Nightly 118.0a1, and on the same phone's old version of Chrome,106.0.5249.126 (which apparently no longer will update).

The bcas.metalvps.com server is using Business Casual version 7.0.8 and Bootstrap version 5.1.3. The current versions seem to be 7.0.9 and 5.1.3. Perhaps updating might fix the issue, but I want to understand why the issue is happening in the existing setup.

Could somebody here please help me figure out how and why the alluring coffee beans background image no longer is displayed by my Duet 5 Chromebook's Chrome browser?

Thanks!