Chrome Manifest v2 browser action vs v3 service worker

In Chrome’s Manifest V2 if you wanted to have a popup.html that displayed when you clicked on your extension icon in the browser you would register that in your manifest.js file as an browser_action field using the default_popup key:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  ...
  "browser_action": {
   "default_popup": "popup.html"
 }
}

This changed in the release of Manifest V3 where now to have a popup.html page rendered you need to register that in your manifest.js file as an action field using the default_popup key:

{
  "manifest_version": 3,
  ...
  "action": {
   "default_popup": "popup.html"
  },
}

In both of implementations this script runs in a separate thread than the browser and can be used to make network requests, interact with data storage mechanisms, broadcast messages, etc. Service workers are non-blocking scripts, meaning they are completely asynchronous.

Chrome extensions created by DevDecks:

• Http Sheriff
• YouTube Control Tower