No, Google isn’t killing ad blockers: AdGuard's CTO Andrey Meshkov on the Manifest V2 panic
The recent headlines have dramatized the situation quite a bit. So rather than add to the noise, let me walk you through an objective timeline of what has actually been happening.
The story
This whole story about "Chrome disabling ad blockers" begins back in 2019. Around that time, Google had finally staffed up the team responsible for browser extensions in Chrome, and they set out to do something useful. The biggest problem they faced was that the Chrome Web Store had become flooded with malicious extensions — Google's moderation was frankly poor, and all sorts of junk kept slipping through. A second, related issue was the abundance of low-quality extensions that dragged down browser performance.
Their solution was to launch a new version of the extension platform, which they called Manifest V3, or MV3, that was designed to replace the older Manifest V2 platform. The catch was that this new version stripped extensions of various capabilities in a number of places. Whether it actually solved the original problems is debatable.
On the security front nobody has ever been able to explain how MV3 helps. On performance, though, the story is different: MV3 genuinely does help the browser suffer less from poorly written extensions.
To soften the blow for content blockers specifically, the platform added a set of new capabilities meant to make up for what was being taken away (the so-called declarative net request API). But to be honest: had Google shipped MV3 in the form they originally envisioned in 2019, it really could have been the death of ad blockers — and a lot of other extensions too.
The collaboration
What changed that outcome was years of collaboration. That same year, Google came to the annual ad blocker dev conference to present the new platform and ask what they needed to do so that ad blockers could keep working normally — and they have returned to that conference every year since. In parallel, Google joined Mozilla and Apple to form the W3C WebExtensions Community Group, a standards body through which we, the extension developers, worked alongside all of them to improve MV3 and make it something that could satisfy all parties.
It was a long road, but through that collective effort MV3 was eventually brought into a workable state. Only five years after the first announcement did Google finally roll the platform out in Chrome, at which point many extensions — ad blockers included — migrated over to it. As for how well ad blockers perform today, I won't pretend the transition was painless: compared to the previous version, our lives got a little harder and the product became somewhat tougher to maintain. But end users are unlikely to notice much of a difference. Ad blockers are very much alive.
The short version: this story dragged on for a very long time, and through collective effort we got MV3 into a workable state. It was only five years after the first announcement that Google finally rolled out MV3 in its browser, and many extensions migrated to it.
The current state
That brings us to what is happening right now. Even though Chrome itself moved to MV3 back in 2024, its codebase still retained the ability to run the old MV2 extensions. All of that legacy code was still present — and while Chrome no longer relied on it, the third-party browsers built on the Chromium engine (such as Opera, Edge, and Brave) did. Starting with version 150, that old code is being removed from Chromium, which means old MV2 extensions will stop working in those third-party Chromium-based browsers. And realistically, the developers behind them are unlikely to have the resources to maintain MV2 on their own, since the code is complex and reaches deep into a large number of browser components.
The bottom line
Google isn't "turning anything off" today — all the important events already happened between 2019 and 2024. Ad blockers are fine. We were never thrilled about the move to MV3, but the predicted apocalypse never arrived. The real casualties of these changes aren't ad blockers, but the third-party browsers that had kept supporting old MV2 extensions up to now (and used that as a competitive advantage over Chrome).
And if you’re someone who relies on the full power of the webRequest API — the kind of deep, flexible filtering that MV3's declarative approach can’t fully replicate — don’t forget that there’s always Firefox. Mozilla continues to support webRequest in its full form, which means the most demanding content blockers can keep doing everything they’ve always done. However the Chromium ecosystem evolves, users still have options.
