We counted what Chrome's Manifest V2 sunset actually removed — and it wasn't the ad blockers

For years the headline wrote itself: Chrome is going to kill ad blockers. Manifest V2 — the old extension platform that let ad blockers and privacy tools intercept and rewrite your traffic with the blocking webRequest API — was being retired, and Chrome 150 is the release that finally removes the last of it. Cue a half-decade of "the end of ad blocking" coverage.

We run a catalog that reads the manifest_version of every extension across the Chrome, Firefox, and Edge stores, so instead of guessing, we just looked. The picture in the data is more interesting — and a lot less apocalyptic — than the headline.

The ad blockers already moved. All of them.

Here's the finding that should end the panic: every ad blocker we track on the Chrome Web Store already runs Manifest V3. All 542 ad-blocker / uBlock / AdGuard listings in our Chrome data are on MV3. Not most. All of them.

The big names you'd actually recognize are sitting right there, live and MV3:

• AdBlock — ~62M users, MV3
• Adblock Plus — ~40M users, MV3
• uBlock Origin Lite — ~17M users, MV3
• AdGuard — ~16M users, MV3
• Ghostery, Privacy Badger, AdBlocker Ultimate — all MV3

The one genuine casualty is the classic build of uBlock Origin — the purist favorite — because its maintainer deliberately didn't convert it. He shipped uBlock Origin Lite (MV3) as a separate, leaner tool instead. So even there, the story isn't "uBlock is dead," it's "uBlock split into a classic build that left Chrome and an MV3 build that stayed." If you use a mainstream blocker on Chrome, you almost certainly updated to its MV3 version months ago without noticing.

So the dramatic part of the prophecy — your ad blocker stops working — mostly resolved itself quietly, long before the deadline.

What actually got stranded

That doesn't mean nothing broke. In our catalog, 6,063 Chrome extensions were still on Manifest V2 — and every single one of them is already marked unavailable in the store. They weren't waiting for Chrome 150 to disable them; they were pulled from the Web Store ahead of the deadline, the way Google has handled non-compliant listings throughout this transition.

The interesting part is what they are. Sort that stranded set by install base and the top of the list doesn't read like a privacy-tools roundup — it reads like a school's IT inventory: classroom companions, graphing and diagramming helpers, kids' reading apps, LEGO Education tools, school-portal launchers, plus a tail of legacy productivity add-ons whose makers simply stopped touching them. These are extensions that quietly stopped being maintained, not the actively-developed blocker ecosystem. The migration sorted the living from the abandoned, and it's the abandoned that got left behind — the same unmaintained-software risk I dug into in why abandoned extensions are a security problem.

Manifest V2 didn't die — it moved to Firefox

This is the part almost nobody reports, and it's the most useful thing to know. Manifest V2 is still very much alive — just not on Chrome. In our catalog, 61,083 Firefox extensions are still on Manifest V2 and still listed, because Mozilla committed to keeping MV2 and the blocking webRequest API with no deprecation timeline.

So MV2 didn't end; it changed address. If you specifically want the old-style, maximum-control blocking behavior — the thing the "Chrome kills ad blockers" panic was really about — it lives on Firefox now. That's a concrete, durable answer for power users, not a doomsday countdown.

Why the scary numbers were wrong

You'll have seen much bigger figures floating around — tens of thousands of extensions, hundreds of millions of users "affected." Those numbers come from counting every MV2 extension across all three stores and attributing them to Chrome's deadline. That's a category error: it folds in the ~67k Firefox MV2 extensions that aren't going anywhere, and Edge, which runs its own Chromium timeline. Strip it down to what Chrome's removal actually touches and you get ~6,000 already-delisted listings — not 70,000 live ones. Measuring the thing instead of vibing about it is more or less the whole reason we exist.

What this means for you

If you're a regular Chrome user: you're very likely fine. The blocker you rely on already shipped its MV3 build. The one thing worth doing is opening chrome://extensions, turning on Developer mode, and glancing at what's installed — if some old utility went quiet, MV2 removal is the probable cause, and the fix is finding a maintained MV3 successor.

If you specifically want classic blocking-webRequest power: that capability now lives on Firefox, not Chrome.

If you build extensions: on Chromium, MV2 is a dead end — ship Manifest V3. Firefox still accepts MV2, but treat it as a bridge, not a destination, and know that MV3 ad blocking holds up better than the early panic suggested (the peer-reviewed evidence is here).

Haven't made the jump yet? My free Manifest V3 generator builds a cross-browser manifest with live store-policy validation, and the @extenshi/cli scanner (npx @extenshi/cli) flags MV2-era patterns before you upload — 3 scans are free, one-time, and prepaid packs cover you when you need more.

A few questions people keep asking

Do I need to do anything if I use an ad blocker on Chrome? Almost certainly not. Every mainstream blocker — AdBlock, Adblock Plus, AdGuard, uBlock Origin Lite — shipped its Manifest V3 build long before Chrome 150, and Chrome updated you automatically. If yours still works, you're already on MV3.

Is uBlock Origin gone from Chrome? The classic build is, because its maintainer chose not to convert it. The replacement, uBlock Origin Lite, is a separate MV3 extension that stayed on the store. So you didn't lose the project — you switched to its leaner version.

I want the old blocking-webRequest power. Where did it go? Firefox. Mozilla kept Manifest V2 and the blocking webRequest API with no deprecation date, so 61,000+ Firefox extensions still run MV2. If maximum-control blocking is what you're after, that capability now lives there, not on Chrome. The webRequest permission breakdown explains exactly what that API can see.

How do I tell if an extension I use was affected? Check its Manifest version and store availability. You can look any extension up in the Extenshi catalog to see whether it's MV2 or MV3 and whether it's still live in the store.

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Numbers in this piece come from Extenshi's catalog: the most recent scan of each store listing's manifest_version field and its last-observed store availability, as of mid-2026. A listing we mark "unavailable" is one our crawler could no longer retrieve from the store; counts shift as we re-scan. We don't independently verify upstream vendor claims. If you think something here is off, tell us at [email protected].

Browse the catalog → to check the Manifest version and store status of the extensions you actually use.