Google is closing the final technical loophole that allowed millions of Chrome users to keep running powerful ad blockers. With Chrome 150, expected to ship on June 30, 2026, the company will remove the last remaining flag — ExtensionManifestV2Disabled — that power users had relied on to keep Manifest V2-based extensions alive. Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed in a Chromium code review that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them.”
The change marks the end of a years-long transition from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3 (MV3) — a new framework that governs how Chrome extensions are built and what permissions they can request. Google has pitched MV3 as a security and performance improvement, but critics have long argued that the shift also conveniently undermines the most effective ad-blocking tools available, at a time when advertising revenue is Google’s primary business.
The most widely used casualty is uBlock Origin, one of the most popular browser extensions ever made. The full version of uBlock Origin — built on MV2 — was disabled for standard Chrome users in July 2025. What remained were narrow technical workarounds that kept it functional for a small subset of users willing to dig into Chrome flags. Chrome 150 eliminates those workarounds entirely. A lighter version, uBlock Origin Lite, is available on the Chrome Web Store and works within MV3’s constraints, but it lacks cosmetic filtering, full-size custom filter lists, and real-time adaptive blocking.
The cleanup continues into July. Chrome 151 will remove additional legacy flags — ExtensionManifestV2Unsupported, ExtensionManifestV2Availability, and AllowLegacyMV2Extensions — completing the transition and leaving no path back to MV2 extensions for everyday users.
The impact extends beyond Chrome itself. Microsoft Edge, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers are expected to follow suit, since they share the same underlying codebase. Mozilla’s Firefox, however, has taken a different approach — maintaining support for both MV2 and MV3 simultaneously, which means uBlock Origin continues to work there without any restrictions.
For users who want to keep blocking ads effectively in Chrome, the practical options are switching to an MV3-compliant blocker (though these are generally less capable), switching browsers entirely to Firefox or Brave, or using a VPN with built-in ad blocking.
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