Does uBlock Origin Still Work on Chrome? No (2026 Status)

No. Full uBlock Origin has not run on stable Chrome since Chrome 138 shipped on July 24, 2025, when Google disabled every Manifest V2 extension with no way to turn them back on. The Chrome Web Store listing is still live (v1.72.2, updated July 8, 2026), which is exactly why so many people believe it still works. It doesn’t.

Key takeaways

• Full uBlock Origin has been dead on stable Chrome since Chrome 138 (July 24, 2025). Chrome 151, due July 28, 2026, deletes the last MV2 code paths from the browser.
• The store listing survives until August 31, 2026, when Google removes all remaining MV2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Installing it today gets you a permanently disabled extension.
• On Chrome, your options are MV3 blockers: uBlock Origin Lite, AdGuard, Ghostery. Full uBlock Origin lives on in Firefox.

The uBlock Origin Listing Is Alive. The Extension Is Not.

This is the confusion that keeps the “does it still work” question alive a full year after the answer became no. Check the store page and everything looks healthy:

Every signal a normal person checks says “working extension”: recent update, huge user base, high rating, no warning banner on the page. gorhill really does keep shipping MV2 updates to the listing. But Chrome itself refuses to run any MV2 extension, and has since Chrome 138. The 12 million user count is an artifact: legacy installs that can no longer execute, plus older builds and Chromium forks where MV2 still loads.

A previous version of this article said uBlock Origin was back and a reinstall would fix a disabled copy. That was wrong on the point that matters. The listing returned; the ability to run it on stable Chrome did not.

When Chrome Actually Killed uBlock Origin

Every date below comes from Google’s own MV2 deprecation timeline, cross-checked July 2026:

The functional death was July 24, 2025 — nearly a year before this update. Everything since has been cleanup. gorhill’s own README says it plainly: end of support on Chrome 139.

Why the Flag Workarounds Died in Chrome 150 and 151

After Chrome 138, two undocumented chrome://flags entries let determined users postpone the shutdown: #extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-disabled and #extension-manifest-v2-deprecation-unsupported. Tech press covered these as the “last resort,” often with garbled names.

Chrome 150, stable since June 30, 2026 and current as of this update, removed the first flag and its underlying feature entirely. The second flag technically still exists in Chrome 150, but Chrome 151 (July 28, 2026, about two weeks after this update) deletes it, the exception-list machinery, and every remaining MV2 feature from the Chromium source. This was verified against the Chromium source tree at the 150 and 151 release tags, not press coverage.

If you are reading this on Chrome 150 with uBlock Origin somehow alive through that last flag, you have until July 28. After that, there is no path on any Chrome channel.

What Still Blocks Ads on Chrome in July 2026

The MV3 field is more capable than the 2024-era doom posts suggested, with real losses you should know about going in:

AdGuard made the cleanest migration. Its MV3 build replaced the main listing back in September 2024, and its knowledge base is unusually candid about the costs: filter auto-update is gone, regex rules cap at 1,000, and the filtering log shows assumed rather than exact rule matches. Still the closest thing to full uBO’s flexibility on Chrome, since dynamic rules allow real custom filtering.

Ghostery runs MV3 with declarativeNetRequest and stays actively maintained. Its strength is tracker blocking and its Never-Consent cookie handling rather than maximum ad coverage.

SuperchargePerformance takes a different angle: it was designed for MV3 from the first commit, so no capability was lost in a porting exercise. 186K+ declarativeNetRequest rules compiled from curated commercial-safe sources cover ads, trackers, malware, and phishing, with dedicated blocking layers for YouTube and Twitch video ads. On top of the blocking it does what no ad blocker attempts: tab suspension with a per-tab RAM dashboard, cookie banner auto-dismissal, and popup blocking. Zero telemetry, no account, free core. If the MV2 sunset taught one lesson, it is to prefer tools built for the current platform over ports grieving the old one.

uBlock Origin Lite Is Better Than Its Reputation

uBO Lite absorbed a lot of secondhand scorn during the MV2 wars, some of it repeated by an earlier version of this article. Corrections, from gorhill’s own uBO Lite FAQ:

• It does have cosmetic filtering. Generic cosmetic filtering is off by default and activates when you raise a site’s blocking mode to Complete. The claim that uBO Lite has none is false.
• It does inject scriptlets. Rulesets ship with bundled scripts, which is how it attempts YouTube ad blocking. “Structurally impossible under MV3” was never accurate.
• The genuine losses: no custom filters or list imports (a deliberate design choice), no dynamic filtering, no per-site remote-font or scripting switches, and no response-header filtering, because declarativeNetRequest cannot express those.
• The genuine bottleneck: filter lists update only when the extension itself updates through Chrome Web Store review. During a YouTube counter-measure wave, that turns same-day filter fixes into a wait measured in weeks.

Its default ruleset hovers around 17K rules against the static-rule pool Chromium shares across extensions, so it is deliberately lean. As a set-and-forget blocker for someone who never touched uBO’s dashboard, it is a fine default. Power users will feel the walls.

Where Full uBlock Origin Still Works

Firefox. gorhill ships stable and development builds for Firefox, Chromium MV2, and Thunderbird, and Mozilla has no MV2 shutdown. On Firefox you keep everything: dynamic filtering, custom lists, the element picker, and filter updates that land the same day a YouTube wave hits.

The Chromium MV2 builds on GitHub serve forks and older builds that still load MV2, not stable Chrome. And the enterprise route closed when Chrome 139 removed the policy key. If full uBlock Origin is non-negotiable for you, the browser is the variable now, not the extension.

What to Do Now

• Still have uBlock Origin installed and grayed out → uninstall it; nothing revives it on stable Chrome, and the listing itself disappears August 31, 2026
• Want the nearest uBO experience on Chrome → AdGuard MV3 for custom filtering depth, or uBO Lite for a lean zero-config blocker
• Want blocking plus tab suspension, RAM tracking, and cookie banner handling in one MV3 extension → SuperchargePerformance
• Refuse to give up full uBlock Origin → move to Firefox; that is the only place it still runs with everything intact
• On Chrome 150 with an MV2 extension limping along via the last flag → it ends July 28, 2026, with Chrome 151