Chrome closes the loopholes that kept old ad blockers alive: what's changing and why
The latest move by Google's Chrome team on ad-blocking extensions is being read as the final act of a transition that has run for years. Chrome is closing the last loopholes that kept the older Manifest V2 extension system working.
According to The Verge, users who relied on enterprise policy settings had been able to keep Manifest V2 extensions running for a while longer. With the new update, that access is being tightened as well.
To understand why Manifest V2 matters, it helps to look at how tools like uBlock Origin actually work. These extensions intercept the requests a website sends to the browser and outright block specific resources — ads, tracking scripts, malware servers and more.
Over the past few years, Google introduced a new system called Manifest V3. It substantially curtails the ability of extensions to intercept network requests; rules have to be declared up front as allow/block lists, rather than acted on dynamically.
The lead developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, has long warned that Manifest V3 would make his tool unable to function at its current effectiveness. uBlock Origin Lite has appeared, but its feature parity with the original is not one for one.
Google's stated rationale falls under two headings: security and performance. Manifest V2 extensions can see the full sweep of a user's browsing and have themselves become a vector for malicious code; Manifest V3 narrows that surface area.
Critics see another picture. Google's core business is advertising, which makes purely engineering-framed defences of the change hard to take at face value. The European Commission and several US regulators are watching closely.
For users, there are practical options. The first is to move to Manifest V3-compatible ad blockers (uBlock Origin Lite, AdGuard). The second is to switch to a non-Chromium browser — Firefox has confirmed it will keep Manifest V2 support for longer.
A third option is DNS-level ad blocking, using tools such as Pi-hole, NextDNS or AdGuard DNS. The approach is browser-independent and covers mobile devices too, but it requires some technical setup.
Vesper presents this as background; if you value the terms of service of the sites you visit and the business model of the news publishers behind them, a selective 'allow list' approach can be a reasonable middle ground.
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