Question: 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

Answer: 
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
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`