The Manifest V2 era on the Chrome Web Store is officially over

Early last month, Google put up a notice confirming it would be booting out MV2 extensions on the Chrome Web Store on August 31. Well, that day has finally arrived, and true enough, legacy extensions that failed to upgrade to the new Manifest V3 standard are no longer available on the Chrome Web Store.

This, however, does not mean that extensions you already have installed on your browser will automatically be wiped out. Instead, Google notes that these extensions “will be unable to receive any updates and cannot be reinstalled from the Chrome Web Store once removed”.

The biggest pushback against this decision comes primarily from folks who rely on uBlock Origin to protect their privacy and also block ads on the web. The extension’s developers even pushed one last update to the store last week to bolster uBO’s security ahead of the cutoff. 

uBO fans can still use the uBlock Origin Lite extension, which is built on the MV3 standard. But it’s not a total replacement for the full-featured version.

Google, for its part, has spent years trying to justify this push to Manifest V3 by pitching better browser security, faster performance, and even battery life gains. The company wants tighter control over what extensions can do behind the scenes. This reasoning even makes a lot of sense when you look at the number of extensions being caught stealing user data lately.

But all this comes with the catch that the new extension rules severely restrict how full-featured ad blockers and privacy tools can inspect and block web traffic. So you win some, you lose some.

That said, the removal from the Chrome Web Store is the final nail in the coffin for a process that has been going on for a while now. Microsoft also recently announced that it’s following Google’s lead and Edge will be dropping MV2 extensions by the end of the year too.

In case not having MV2 extension support is a deal-breaker for you, there’s no reason to panic. Brave and Helium are two Chromium browsers that I recommend without a second thought if you want to keep the familiar Chromium engine while also being able to use uBlock Origin.

Alternatively, if you would prefer stepping away from Chromium entirely, there’s always Firefox to consider. Another great niche browser that’s quickly gaining popularity is Zen. Both are built around Gecko and rely on the Firefox Add-ons store, and will continue supporting classic extensions for the foreseeable future without caring about Google’s store purge.

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