No, Google isn’t killing ad blockers: AdGuard's CTO Andrey Meshkov on the Manifest V2 panic

Google is about to complete the final stage of its long-running Manifest V2 phaseout. Starting with Chrome 150, scheduled for June 30, 2026 and continuing in Chrome 151, Google will remove the remaining compatibility features that have allowed older extensions to survive the transition to Manifest V3. In practical terms, this closes the last major loopholes that users and browser vendors could rely on to keep a number of legacy extensions alive, including those ad blockers that still depend on Manifest V2 functionality.

Because that code lives in Chromium itself, the change will also affect Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi. While browser vendors are technically free to continue supporting Manifest V2 on their own, doing so would require maintaining legacy code after it has been removed upstream. Google engineers have described the remaining MV2 infrastructure as increasingly costly to maintain and pointed to bugs and security issues associated with the old platform. As a result, browsers that want to keep supporting MV2 will have to invest their own engineering resources rather than relying on Chromium to do the work for them — making long-term MV2 support increasingly unlikely.

The news has reignited a familiar narrative: that Google is finally killing ad blockers. Similar claims have accompanied almost every major milestone in the Manifest V3 transition since it was first announced in 2019. The reality is that the most significant part of the Manifest V2 phaseout happened years ago. Major content blockers have adapted, and the web did not suddenly become unfilterable. What is happening now is largely the removal of compatibility mechanisms that outlived the transition itself.

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 tackle some longstanding problems. The biggest issue 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 problem was the abundance of low-quality extensions that hurt browser performance.

Google's solution was to launch a new version of the extension platform, called Manifest V3 (MV3), designed to replace the older Manifest V2 platform. The catch was that the new platform removed or restricted a number of capabilities that extensions had previously relied on. Whether it actually solved the original problems remains debatable.

On the security front, nobody has ever convincingly explained how MV3 helps. On performance, though, the story is different: MV3 genuinely reduces the impact that poorly written extensions can have on the browser.

To soften the blow for content blockers, Google introduced a new set of APIs intended to compensate for some of the functionality being taken away — most notably the declarativeNetRequest API. But to be honest, had Google shipped MV3 in the form originally proposed in 2019, it really could have been the death of ad blockers — and many other extensions too.

The collaboration

What prevented 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 complete the transition to MV3 in Chrome, by 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 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 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 suddenly pulling the plug on anything 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 the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API alongside MV3, which means the most demanding content blockers can keep doing everything they’ve always done. Of course, switching browsers isn't something everyone wants to do. Fortunately, browser extensions aren't the only way to block ads. Network-level and system-wide solutions such as AdGuard don't depend on Chrome's extension platform at all, making them unaffected by the MV2-to-MV3 transition.