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.

Today I had some fun installing plan9port on my Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook. I like the Duet 5 because of its brilliant 13 inch OLED touchscreen. Also, the Duet 5 is small, light, and inexpensive compared to other OLED laptops. The Duet 5 will run Android apps. And built-in to Chrome OS is the ability to run Linux containers. Today's plan9port install was inside one of the containers.

Here is a list of the commands I ran to install plan9port on my Duet 5. If I were doing the install again, I probably would install the four additional, required -dev packages prior to running /use/plan9/INSTALL. Today, I re-ran INSTALL four times following successive failures caused by missing header files.

 2042  cd /usr
 2048  sudo git clone https://github.com/9fans/plan9port plan9
 2050  cd plan9
 2052  sudo /usr/plan9/INSTALL
 2057  sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
 2068  sudo apt-get install libxt-dev
 2078  sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1-dev
 2090  sudo apt-get install libxext-dev
 * Add these to your profile environment.
        PLAN9=/usr/plan9 export PLAN9
        PATH=$PATH:$PLAN9/bin export PATH

Here are Plan 9's rc shell and the sam editor running after the successful install.

chronos@penguin:~$ cat /etc/debian_version 
12.6
chronos@penguin:~$ which rc
/usr/plan9/bin/rc
chronos@penguin:~$ rc
% man sam
  [ . . . ]
% sam -d
 -. 
q
% 

Getting started with plan9port is easy. Please see the getting started tips on Github at Issue 97 in the plan9port repository.

Based on limited testing -- I fired it up once -- my Duet 5's plan9port graphical editor, Acme, seems to work too. For my use, I'm usually happy with the command line tools, but here is a good, brief introductory reference list for plan9port's Acme graphical editor.