[google-chrome-extension] Chrome says my extension's manifest file is missing or unreadable

I'm a new chrome extension developer, and I was going through the Chrome tutorial on making a "Hello World" extension, here's my code:

     {
      "name": "My First Extension",
      "version": "1.0",
      "manifest_version": 2,
      "description": "The first extension that I made.",
      "browser_action": {
       "default_icon": "icon.png"
      },
       "permissions": [
       "http://api.flickr.com/"
      ]
      }

When I went to load the unpacked extension it said the manifest file was missing or unreadable. Yes I have the image in a folder with it and it is correctly named manifest.json

My problem was slightly different.

By default Eclipse saved my manifest.json as an ANSI encoded text file.

Solution:

• Open in Notepad
• File -> Save As
• select UTF-8 from the encoding drop-down in the bottom left.
• Save

If you are downloading samples from developer.chrome.com its possible that your actual folder is contained in a folder with the same name and this is creating a problem. For example your extracted sample extension named tabCapture will lool like this:

C:\Users\...\tabCapture\tabCapture

I also encountered this issue.

My problem was that I renamed the folder my extension was in, so all I had to do was delete and reload the extension.

Thought this might help some people out there.

Mine also was funny. While copypasting " manifest.json" from the tutorial, i also managed to copy a leading space. Couldn't get why it's not finding it.

In my case it was the problem of building the extension, I was pointing at an extension src (with manifest and everything) but without a build.

If you run into this scenario run npm i then npm build

Kindly check whether you have installed right version of ChromeDriver or not . In my case , installing correct version helped.

Some permissions issue for default sample.

I wanted to see how it works, I am creating the first extension, so I downloaded a simpler one.

Downloaded 'Typed URL History' sample from
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/examples/api/history/showHistory.zip

which can be found at
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/samples

this worked great, hope it helps