If you develop a Chrome Extension, you should know that. Some days ago, I received a scary red warning during development of FunBlocker Chrome Extension.
No problem, I can just follow the rules defined in Chrome Extensions Manifest Version and migrate my manifest to get rid of this warning. I just released it and broke my plugin. Why?? It was suposed to Chrome maintain everything up to date and working fine.
Things you should know
- You can disable Chrome auto updates. Yeah, it is not a good option, but I can not blame the user.
- Chrome Extensions are in fact Chromium extensions. Other Chromium based browsers do not update often and extension developers do not have an easy way to handle that.
- Chrome will maintain the extension up to date, even if it does not understand the manifest file.
Reading some docs, I found I can set minimum_chrome_version, but to be honest my app does not depend of the Chrome version.
Based in Chrome schedule, Web Store will block new extensions with manifest_version=1 after Chrome 21 release. I am just maintaining an extension, so it is not a problem for me. Web Store will block updates with manifest_version=1 after Chrome 23 release, planned to early november 2012.
Based in my Analytics data, I have more than 3% of users in browser versions minor than 18 or in Rockmelt, which will not work with manifest upgrade.
My solution
I decided to maintain manifest_version=1 as long as possible (maybe early november). In next months, I will add a friendly warning to my options page like "sorry, but this plugin will not receive updates until you update your browser". After that, I will add minimum_chrome_version=18 and upgrade the manifest_version. Docs does not recommended to use version 2 in Chrome 17, so 18 is a good number.
Just to be clear, I am not against this manifest upgrade, it is really interesting to improve browser security, but some changes break compatilibity instead of do a painless transition.
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