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Change can come unexpectedly, and sometimes it comes forced. The change discussed in this article involves something that has been coming for a long time, but it is not widely known: Manifest V2, the platform that iBoss Cloud Enterprise, Lightspeed Classroom, and uBlock Origin, 3 extensions MCPS use on all their devices, is being deprecated in favor of Manifest V3. In technology, when something is deprecated, the company that makes it stops working on it. Sometimes backward compatibility (when something new works with something old) stops being supported. This is the case for Manifest V2. As of October, Google has already begun giving out updates that no longer include Manifest V2 support. MCPS is currently using a Chrome policy function that allows it to continue using Manifest V2 until June 2025.
The reason iBoss Cloud, Lightspeed, and uBlock have not yet migrated to Manifest V3 is because they use something that will be limited after the switch. webRequest AP is something that most ad blockers use to block ads, since it lets them block it before it is displayed. In Manifest V3, extensions are given a new api to work with: the declarativeNetRequest API. It also allows extensions to block things using prewritten filters, but it is much less dynamic than webRequest.
MCPS is now faced with a difficult decision: either they will have to use the new Manifest V3, something that lacks content blocking capability compared to Manifest V2, or stop updating and buying Chromebooks.
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