Manifest V3 Upgrade

I'm excited to announce that support for Manifest V3 (MV3) is officially here! With the Chrome Web Store now accepting MV3 extensions, it was important to upgrade all of the starter templates and example extensions. Manifest V3 is exciting as it not only provides new features, but it also represents the future vision of the extension platform in Chrome.

What is Manifest V3?

Manifest V3 is one of the largest platform updates in some time and includes a variety of security, privacy, and performance enhancements. One of the biggest driving forces behind this update is to support a shift in philosophy behind how Chrome handles end-user security and privacy in extensions. For more information on Manifest V3, click here.

What changed?

You can find a complete migration guide by clicking here. With regards to the starters in the kit, the main changes were:

• Service workers replace background pages
• browser_action and page_action are now simply action in the manifest definition
• Host permissions are defined separately from regular permissions
• Web-accesible now expect a new format
• Certain Chrome APIs were slightly altered (for example, chrome.extension.getUrl has become chrome.runtime.getUrl)

Other Notes

In addition to upgrading all starters and example extensions to Manifest V3, this kit update also includes:

• A new basic starter for messaging: this starter allows you to communicate between a background script and a content script
• A new React starter for content scripts: this starter allows you to render a React app inside a webpage via a content script

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter and I'll do my best to help out!