I received a kind email this week from someone who used my Chrome extension, OpenList, asking if I was aware it had been de-listed from the Chrome Web Store. I am indeed aware; I de-listed it, and I’m happy to explain why:

I have personally not used this extension in the better part of a decade; I don’t even use Chrome on any regular basis these days. I don’t want to / can’t justify putting time and effort into something I don’t use. And unfortunately the extension is at a point where it was going to require a nontrivial amount of work in the near future.

This year Google is requiring extensions to migrate to “manifest v3,” which is a major change to the APIs that extensions use to integrate with the browser.

OpenList was written over a decade ago following the extension development practices of that era and using the APIs that were available at that time. Bringing it up to the new standard Google is requiring would more-or-less mean rewriting it. it’s a small extension, but I only have so much free time.

Less critically, I’m unhappy with the extension’s UI and icon design, but that alone wouldn’t stop me from continuing to offer it.

I’ll note that the extension’s source code is still available. Depending on your technical expertise, I think that downloading the source repository and adding the extension to your local Chrome installation shouldn’t be too challenging, and it may even be possible to keep using it this way even after Google stops distributing pre-manifest v3 extensions via the Chrome store (though I haven’t verified this myself).