Finding manifest versions of Chrome extensions
I scraped a list of more than 64,000 Chrome extensions and wanted to find their manifest_version, but this isn't mentioned anywhere on the Chrome Web Store's public page. But after spending hours, I finally found a way to know the exact manifest version of each extension, automatically.
First, I am downloading the CRX file of each extension through an automated way, extracting the CRX file to find the manifest.json file, and then reading the JSON file to get the manifest_version (whether it's 2 or 3).
I think, there's a huge opportunity in building much-needed Chrome extensions where they have not been updated to the latest manifest v3 and have stopped working. One can find such an extension with 1000s of downloads/reviews/ratings, and build an alternative one.