If you’ve been quietly running uBlock Origin on Chrome despite years of warnings, your luck is about to run out. This time there’s no workaround left.
Google Chrome 150 will remove the final technical flag that let advanced users keep Manifest V2 extensions running — and with it, popular ad blockers like uBlock Origin will stop working on Chrome entirely. The transition to Manifest V3 has been dragging on for years, but this is the part where Google stops leaving the back door cracked open.
What’s actually happening, and when
A commit appeared in Chromium that removes support for the “kExtensionManifestV2Disabled” flag — described internally as “dead code” since Chrome no longer supports Manifest V2 extensions. That flag was effectively the last loophole that allowed these extensions to keep running.
The timeline is short. Chrome 150 is expected around June 30, 2026, and it removes the main technical workaround experienced users were still relying on. A limited method through DevTools will remain, but it requires manually editing page elements during every session — not remotely practical for daily use. Chrome 151, expected in July 2026, removes the remaining flags entirely.
After that, there’s nothing left to toggle. The extensions simply won’t load.
Google’s argument — and why not everyone buys it
A Google engineer laid out the company’s reasoning directly in the commit. MV2 extensions are no longer permitted in any supported version of Chrome, and the company says it can’t indefinitely maintain the functionality due to its complexity, technical debt, and associated security risks — noting that it had recently discovered several bugs specific to MV2.
There’s real data behind the security claim. A 2024 study found that after the switch to Manifest V3, the number of APIs associated with malicious activity dropped by nearly 88%. That’s not nothing — Manifest V2’s broad permissions genuinely were a vector for abusive extensions.
But critics have always pointed at the obvious conflict of interest: Google makes its money from advertising, and the extensions being broken are the ones that block ads. The security framing is accurate and self-serving at the same time. Both things can be true.
What this means for you
If you use Chrome and rely on uBlock Origin, you have until the end of June before the experience starts degrading, and until July before it’s fully gone. This also affects other Chromium-based browsers, though the engineer noted that other browsers are free to continue supporting MV2 if they choose. Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow Google’s lead.
The realistic options are narrowing to two: switch to a browser that hasn’t gutted ad-blocking — Firefox still fully supports the old extension model, and uBlock Origin works there without compromise — or move to a Manifest V3-compatible blocker like uBlock Origin Lite, which is more limited by design because the new framework gives extensions far less power to filter content.
Neither is a perfect replacement for what’s being lost. And that, ultimately, is the point of the whole transition — not that ad blocking becomes impossible, just that it becomes weaker, clunkier, and a little less effective on the world’s most popular browser. For a company that sells ads, that’s not a bug. It’s the strategy.