Browser Extension - Manifest v3

As you might be aware, starting in June 2024, older Chrome extensions based on "manifest version 2" will begin to become deprecated. At the time of writing, the Affixa browser extension uses version 2.

What does the Affixa browser extension do?

The extension provides value-added functionality on top of Affixa Desktop or Affixa Enterprise; it isn't a fundamental part of how Affixa works.

Specifically, the extension will:

  • show a draft message in your existing Gmail tab (as opposed to a new tab) when you've already got Gmail open in your browser for the account in question; or
  • let Gmail load as normal if you don't already have Gmail open in your browser.

Without the browser extension, the above won't happen, but the sending of messages or the creation of draft messages are unaffected.

What's the status of an extension based on the v3 manifest?

It's already been written and appears to work well in Chrome in our testing.

We wish that was the full answer, but the reality is that we're still not ready to release the newer version. This is because:

  1. It doesn't work quite so well in other Chromium browsers - e.g. Edge, Brave, etc. This is because the intercepting of web requests (known as "declarative net requests") seems to be temperamental; sometimes it'll intercept requests as designed, other times it just won't.
  2. We currently use the same browser extension for both Chromium browsers and Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox is quite behind on its v3 implementation, so a shared extension based on manifest v3 just isn't possible at the current time.

As such, despite having done the development work on the newer version of the extension, we've decided to sit on it for a while longer, allowing other browsers to stabilise their implementations or catch up.

Does this mean you'll have a new version in time for June 2024?

We genuinely don't know at this point. Keep in mind that it will only impact non-stable browsers from June 2024, so won't impact most people at that point. Enterprises can keep v2 extensions functional until June 2025 at the earliest too.

As soon as the ecosystem is stable, we'll release the newer version.