Chrome Manifest V2 End of Life: What Dies in August 2026

Chrome’s Manifest V2 end of life completes this summer. MV2 extensions stopped running on stable Chrome with Chrome 138 (July 24, 2025). Chrome 151, reaching stable on July 28, 2026, deletes the last developer flags from Chromium’s source. On August 31, 2026, Google removes every remaining MV2 extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Key takeaways

• MV2 is not “about to” die — it already did. No MV2 extension has run on stable Chrome since Chrome 138 shipped in July 2025. The two dates left in 2026 close the developer flags (July 28) and purge the Web Store (August 31).
• MV3’s four changes: service workers replace background pages, declarativeNetRequest replaces blocking webRequest, remote code is banned, host permissions tightened.
• MV3-built extensions are unaffected. The disruption hit MV2-only tools like full uBlock Origin, not extensions built on declarativeNetRequest from the start.

Most coverage of the “Manifest V2 deadline” treats it as one future event. It is actually a five-year phase-out with two steps remaining, and neither of them will change what runs in your browser today. Below: what already happened, what the two 2026 dates actually do, and which blockers work under MV3.

The MV2 Shutdown So Far, Verified Against Google’s Timeline

Google’s own deprecation timeline page (last updated July 8, 2026) is the primary source, and it contradicts most of what circulates about this topic. The verified sequence:

The single most common error in write-ups is the claim that some recent Chrome version “is the last to support MV2.” That framing is a year stale at best. For ordinary users the shutdown finished with Chrome 138 in July 2025; for managed enterprise machines, with Chrome 139. Everything since has been cleanup.

July 28, 2026: Chrome 151 Deletes the Last MV2 Machinery

Through Chrome 149, two undocumented developer flags survived in chrome://flags: #extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-disabled and #extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-unsupported. These were escape hatches for extension developers, never a supported user path, and Google’s official timeline page does not mention them at all.

Chrome 150 (stable June 30, 2026) deleted the first flag and its underlying feature switch. Chrome 151, which reaches stable on July 28, 2026, deletes the second, and with it every remaining Manifest V2 feature switch in Chromium’s source, including the command-line-only AllowLegacyMV2Extensions override. This is verifiable directly in the Chromium source at the release tags: the Chrome 151 branch contains zero MV2 re-enable code.

Press coverage of this step has been garbled. Some reports named a nonexistent “ExtensionManifestV2Disabled developer flag”; others claimed the enterprise ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy dies in 151, when its support actually ended at Chrome 138. The accurate version is simpler: after July 28, 2026, no mechanism to run an MV2 extension exists anywhere in stable Chrome.

August 31, 2026: The Web Store Purge

Google’s timeline states it plainly: on August 31, 2026, “all remaining Manifest V2 extensions are removed from the Chrome Web Store.”

This date matters less for your browser than for the store’s long tail. The most prominent example: full uBlock Origin’s listing is still live as of July 2026 — version 1.72.2, still Manifest V2, updated July 8, 2026, showing 12 million users. None of those installs have actually run on stable Chrome since Chrome 138; the count reflects legacy installs on old, enterprise, or forked Chromium builds. On August 31, the listing itself goes away, along with every other MV2 holdout.

If an extension you use works today, it is already MV3 and this date does not touch it. The purge removes ghosts, not working software.

What Manifest V3 Actually Changed

MV3 is not a cosmetic version bump. It rewrote four parts of the extension model, and each one broke a category of older extension behavior.

The networking change is the one that made headlines. Blocking webRequest let an MV2 extension intercept every request and decide in JavaScript whether to block, redirect, or modify it. declarativeNetRequest flips the model: the extension hands Chrome a set of static rules ahead of time, and Chrome’s own engine does the matching without running extension code per request. That is faster and more private by design, since the extension never sees the request stream. It is also more constrained, because the extension cannot make per-request decisions in code. Full uBlock Origin’s dynamic filtering, dynamic URL filtering, and per-site scripting switches all depend on exactly that per-request code path, which is why the full version never ported.

Ad Blockers That Work Under MV3, as of July 2026

Every option below runs on current stable Chrome and survives both remaining 2026 dates. The honest capability losses are listed alongside, because each MV3 blocker traded something away.

A common misreading is that uBO Lite “has no cosmetic filtering.” It does: generic cosmetic filtering ships in the extension but is off by default, and raising a site’s blocking mode to Complete turns it on. What Lite lacks is the dynamic layer — custom rules, list imports, per-site scripting switches — which declarativeNetRequest cannot express.

SuperchargePerformance illustrates the other side of the DNR tradeoff: static rules scale. It runs 186K+ DNR rules compiled from 22 curated filter sources (June 2026 compilation), evaluated natively by Chrome’s engine with zero per-request JavaScript, alongside tab suspension via chrome.tabs.discard(). Because the architecture was MV3-native from the start, none of the shutdown milestones since 2024 changed how it works. For the full comparison, see uBlock Origin vs Lite and does uBlock Origin still work on Chrome.

Whether You Need to Do Anything Before August 31

• Your extensions all work today → they are MV3 already; neither 2026 date affects you.
• An extension you relied on stopped working in 2024 or 2025 → it was MV2-only. Install its MV3 replacement from the Web Store before August 31, while its listing can still point you to the successor.
• You want full uBlock Origin’s dynamic filtering specifically → that capability lives on Firefox now, which kept MV2-style webRequest. On Chrome, uBlock Origin Lite is the closest substitute, with the limits above.
• You just want ad and tracker blocking that works under MV3 → any DNR-based blocker in the table runs fine on current Chrome and past both dates.
• You maintain an MV2 extension → your listing disappears from the Web Store on August 31, 2026. An MV3 rebuild is the only path that keeps it installable.