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Your favorite Chrome extensions may be going away — here's what you need to do
- The Chrome browser will soon stop supporting some of its best extensions.
- This includes popular ad-blocker extensions like uBlock Origin.
- Google recommends switching to extensions that will be supported after Chrome’s update.
If you have any important extensions installed on your Chrome browser, you should give them a quick check. Some of your favorite Chrome extensions may stop working soon.
One of Chrome’s most popular ad-blocking extensions is uBlock Origin. Recently, users of uBlock Origin have noticed that the extension has been flagged with a warning that it “may soon no longer be supported because it doesn’t follow best practices for Chrome extensions.”
If you’re wondering what Google means by best practices, it is referring to Chrome’s Manifest V3. To keep it as simple as possible, the Manifest is a set of rules that defines how extensions integrate with a browser and interact with webpages. The browser is currently transitioning from MV2 to MV3 and uBlock Origin is not supported on MV3.
This transition has been happening for a while, but you can check one of our earlier articles if you want a deeper explanation. All you need to know is that uBlock Origin and other MV2 extensions may stop working once the transition is done.
The creators of the ad-blocker recommend installing uBlock Origin Lite, which is supported by MV3. For other extensions at risk of being disabled, you’ll need to find an MV3 alternative for those as well. If they don’t have a warning message on the Chrome Web Store page, they should be fine.
Google said back in May that 85% of actively maintained extensions in the Chrome Web Store are already running MV3. But if you absolutely must have uBlock Origin or some other unsupported extension, they’ll still be available on Firefox and other browsers that do not intend to deprecate MV2 extensions.