Adblock Plus doing just fine after updating to Manifest V3 … two years ago | Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus doing just fine after updating to Manifest V3 … two years ago · 2026-06-19 12:42 by Ben
We’re very happy to report that despite some headlines that Google’s Chrome had decided to kill ad blocking, we remain very much alive. Kicking actually, and ready to protect you from the surveillance capitalists and annoying distractions of the internet. So, once for the record, Adblock Plus works in Chrome. Here’s what happened and why you don’t need to worry.
The centerpiece of the misconception is a transition Google announced for Chrome’s extensions back in 2018, from Manifest Version 2 (MV2) to Manifest Version 3 (MV3). The stated reasons were improving security, privacy, and performance; at the time, though, the real story was that the main functionality that made ad blocking possible was replaced with something more limited, often problematic, and, at the time, unfinished. While the introduction of MV3 created ripples for many extension developers, discarding the webRequestBlocking application programming interface (API) in favor of the declarativeNetRequest API meant the browser took control of how to block network requests, not the content blocker, which previously held this power. This caused widespread consternation among content blockers and users alike, and many speculated that ad blocking would never recover.
Many ad blockers either refused or were unable to make the transition to Manifest V3, but we, along with a handful of others, put in the time and development necessary to change over, completing our MV3 transition ahead of Google’s 2024 deadline. What’s happening now is the final cleanup: Chrome is removing the old MV2 code from its codebase entirely, which also closes a workaround that had kept MV2 extensions running on other Chromium-based browsers in the meantime. Chrome 149 is the last version to support them; once they update to 150 they’ll basically be gone for good.
Call it the final straw on the camel’s back or a last nail in the coffin – just don’t say we (and many others) are in that coffin.
The deeper story
There is a tale of cooperation at the core of why we, and many other extensions, transitioned successfully to MV3. Between Chrome’s initial announcement of the change to MV3 in 2018 and removing support for MV2 in 2024, we, along with a group of other extensions, worked with Chrome’s browser extensions team to make adjustments so that the migration to MV3 had as small an impact as possible on users.
That included the Chrome team coming to the Ad Blocker Developer Summit, the diligent work of the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) WebExtensions Community Group, not to mention a lot of less formal but very pivotal collaboration that is ongoing.
Finally, in 2024, the change was made and a host of ad blockers, including Adblock Plus, made the jump. Not everyone decided to do it, some because of the constraints of having small teams, others over ideology or something like it; and that’s fine. For those of us who did, additional improvements have continued to make ad blocking on Chrome now, as ever, very effective. And very alive.
Keep on protecting yourself out there, including on Chrome.
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