[chii]

they can easily just blacklist ubo if they really wanted to remove it. And they can make it plausibly deniable - by blacklisting the extension id of anything that is in the chrome extension store that originally had manifestV2 (which will have some collateral damage, but obviously google doesn't care).

[anticensor]

But that would also harm companies that actually intend to switch to a v3 based replacement but need a bit of time to complete the development.

[chii]

That's what the registry entry for the manifestV2 time extension is for - this was actually known for several years already, and 2025 june is meant to have been the deadline for that development.