Google Has Pulled Every Manifest V2 Extension from the Chrome Web Store — Including uBlock Origin

Google has reached the finish line of a transition it had been preparing for years: every remaining extension built on Manifest V2 has been removed from the Chrome Web Store. Among them is uBlock Origin — one of the most powerful and respected content blockers ever created for the web.

According to the company, MV2 extensions already installed in Chrome 138 or earlier will stay in place but will no longer receive updates. Once they're gone, reinstalling them from the store won't be possible. The Chrome Web Store team notified the developers whose extensions were affected by the decision separately.

The fallout reaches beyond Chrome

The Chrome Web Store is the dominant extension marketplace for every browser built on the Chromium engine. Users of non-Chrome builds, including Brave, rely on it too for finding and installing add-ons. That's why the removal hits more than just Chrome itself: MV2 extensions can no longer be found and installed through the store, even if a particular Chromium-based browser still supports Manifest V2.

Brave rescues a favorite few

The Brave team chose not to leave its users hanging and hosted four popular MV2 extensions on its own backend, letting them be enabled right inside the browser. The list includes AdGuard, uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and NoScript.

Google's reasoning is straightforward: the new MV3 platform, the company claims, delivers stronger security and privacy, better performance, and tighter control over what extensions are allowed to do. Given how much access to a user's activity browser add-ons are granted, those concerns are genuinely real — the only catch is that the price of addressing them turned out to be noticeable for anyone who valued the flexibility of the old blockers.

Source: Hacker News