This is my second attempt to migrate the Images On/Off extension to “manifest 3”. I hope I fixed the bug in version 3.0 and also — I removed one useless checkbox from the “options” page.
Apologies for the broken version 3.0. Although I tested for two days before publishing, I somehow didn’t find this bug.
If you are interested in the technical details (why I had to migrate the extension and what went wrong) — read below.
Sorry for the inconvenience and let’s hope I didn’t mess it this time.
Why I had to update
Google requires all chrome extensions to be migrated to “Manifest 3” in order to remain in the chrome web store. Every time I log in to the Chrome Web Store developer dashboard, I am welcomed with this message:
I have no idea when they’ll decide to remove it but I believe at some moment all old manifest 2 extensions will go bust. That’s why I had to rewrite most of the code to, basically, recreate the whole thing…
What went wrong
Technically, I forgot to take into account that in the new (manifest 3) way of doing things, background scripts are not persistent. And JavaScript requires the programmer to take into account what’s already loaded and what’s not…
Long story short — after a minute or so the extension just went to sleep, and when user clicked the icon after that, it wasn’t executing the commands in the right order…
Old code, spagetti and rushing to catch the weekend developer… and we got what we got.
What else I changed
I removed the “http / https” options from the settings page. 10 years ago, when I initially published this extension, there were http sites. Nowadays those are extinct, so I don’t see a reason to keep this checkbox.
Hope that was the last nasty bug in this extension.
Best,
Vlad