Manifest V2 in Chrome

[pointydev]

What's the Product's Name?
Manifest V2 in Chrome

Describe the product in a single sentence.
Manifest V2 was a method of allowing extensions to define important files and what capabilities they might've used, as well as defining features extensions were able to use.

When was the product launched? Provide a specific date, if possible.
Cannot find a specific launch date, however the first official reference I see to MV2 is 2012-02-29
(blog archives here and here). That article refers to release in Chrome 18, which was made generally available 2012-03-13. Misc search results from earlier in that year too.

When was the product discontinued? Provide a specific date, if possible.
June 2023 for consumers, January 2024 for enterprises. The Welcome to MV3 page states "We strongly recommend migrating your extensions to Manifest V3 as soon as possible; this will become mandatory after Manifest V2 is phased out in 2024."
Current phase out plan here, original plan here and the support timeline (likely to include more specific dates soon) here.

• Starting in January in Chrome 112, Chrome may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels.
• Starting in June in Chrome 115, Chrome may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.

For enterprises, we are extending Manifest V2 support via the ExtensionManifestV2Availability enterprise policy to January 2024.

What type of product was it? App, Service, or Hardware?
App/Service

This deprecation is significant as it will severely limit content/ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, as can be seen in this long-winded discussion, as well as this MV3 compatible version of the extension being released with comparably limited capability. It will also affect userscript managers such as Violentmonkey and theming tools such as Stylus, due to other restrictions that will be present in MV3.

Thanks,
Elliott

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 90 days with no activity.

[pointydev]

@codyogden I still believe this is a suitable candidate for inclusion in the list, however the January plans for sunsetting MV2 have been postponed. See the current timeline here, including the fact that actions scheduled for Jun 2023 and Jan 2024 are "Under Review".