Circulating as a practical guide for users whose extensions stopped working is a dev.to post about clipboard managers after Chrome's Manifest V2 removal — though it is also a disclosed product pitch. Viktor Ermolov develops Clipstay, one of the clipboard managers the post discusses, and the author identifies as Rio, an AI assistant to Ermolov. At the top of the article that disclosure appears, and how the recommendation at the end is read should be shaped by it.
The post's central factual content is a three-stage timeline it attributes to an official Google schedule. It says Manifest V2 extensions were disabled by default for all Chrome users on March 31, 2025, though users could still re-enable them. It then places a second stage on July 24, 2025, when Chrome 138 disabled Manifest V2 extensions everywhere and re-enabling was no longer possible. A third stage, dated August 31, 2026, is described as the removal of all remaining Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store.
That third date is the one to handle carefully. The post presents it as part of the same schedule, but the supplied evidence does not include the official timeline it cites, and the article does not state whether that stage has already occurred. Readers should treat the first two dates as the author's account of a published schedule and the third as a scheduled milestone rather than a confirmed completed event.
To the final stage the post adds a practical caveat: for now, installations still working on Chrome 138 or earlier remain functional, yet no updates reach them and reinstallation is impossible once they are removed. For anyone still relying on an older extension paired with an older browser build, that is the operative distinction — the tool may function, but it is frozen and cannot be recovered once deleted.
The author's argument about impact is a characterization rather than a measurement. The post says clipboard managers were hit harder than average because the classic ones were often written years earlier against Manifest V2 background pages, and many were abandoned well before the migration deadline. The result, in the author's framing, is that users went from a working tool to nothing without warning from the developer. No survey, count of affected extensions, or methodology is offered to support the "harder than average" claim.
The bulk of the article is a five-point checklist for evaluating a Manifest V3 replacement. The first check is whether the tool handles text only or also rich content such as images and formatted text, since most new clipboard managers are text-only. The second is capture scope: many extensions only watch web pages, so text copied in other applications may enter the history only when the popup is opened, or not at all.
The third check concerns where data lives. The post recommends preferring extensions that keep history on the device with no account and no analytics, and it advises checking whether password fields and Incognito windows are excluded from capture. The fourth covers search, pins and export, arguing that a history you cannot search is a junk drawer and that JSON or CSV export prevents lock-in. The fifth is free-tier limits: check the history size and pin count before committing a workflow.
The recommendation that follows is Clipstay, described as a clipboard history manager for Chrome built for this situation. The author states plainly that they are the AI assistant to its developer and asks readers to weigh the words accordingly. That is a clear conflict-of-interest disclosure, and it means the product claims that follow are the vendor's own description rather than independent evaluation.
According to the post, Clipstay saves text copied or cut on web pages, lets users search history, pin reused clips, and copy them back with one click. It gives keyboard shortcuts of Control+Shift+V on Mac and Alt+Shift+V on Windows and Linux. It states that data stays on the device with no account and no analytics, that password fields and Incognito windows are never captured, and that JSON or CSV export is free.
The post also lists limitations, which is the most useful part for evaluation. Clipstay stores text only. It captures copy and cut on web pages; text from other applications lands in history only when the popup is opened, via an optional setting. The free plan keeps the 100 most recent clips plus 5 pinned clips. The author says anyone needing image support or capture inside desktop applications should look at a different tool.
For freelancers, designers and developers who depend on clipboard history, the transferable value here is the checklist rather than the endorsement. Because the author is connected to Clipstay, the five criteria — rich content support, capture scope, local storage and password/Incognito exclusions, search and export, and free-tier limits — are more useful as an audit framework than the product recommendation itself.
The tradeoffs are visible in the disclosure. A text-only, web-page-scoped clipboard manager with a 100-clip free ceiling will not suit designers moving images or developers copying between desktop applications and the browser. The post says so directly, which is more than many promotional write-ups do, but the recommendation still comes from an interested party and the capability claims are unverified by any third party in this evidence.
Several things remain unknown. The post does not give pricing for paid tiers, does not state a version number for Clipstay, and provides no independent testing of its capture behavior or storage claims. The Manifest V2 dates are attributed to an official timeline that is not included in the supplied evidence, so the dates should be treated as the author's account rather than confirmed from the primary source.
The broader structural point is that when a platform retires an extension architecture, the tools most likely to disappear are those maintained by small or solo developers who never migrated. That leaves users choosing between newer, narrower replacements and older installs that still run but no longer update. The post describes that tradeoff but does not resolve it, and it does not quantify how many clipboard extensions actually fell into that category.
For this audience, the sensible response is to audit which browser extensions are still receiving updates, check whether any critical workflow depends on a tool that has stopped shipping, and verify export options before that dependency becomes urgent. The post's checklist is a reasonable starting point for that audit; its product recommendation is not independent evidence, and the timeline's final stage should be verified against Google's own documentation before being treated as settled.