Microsoft Edge has begun moving consumers off Manifest V2 extensions, which will cut off the original uBlock Origin and similar ad blockers, as Google Chrome did earlier this year. The Edge team announced the plan on Aug. 7.
“With 95% of the top MV2 extensions on the Edge Add-ons website already moved to MV3, the ecosystem has made meaningful progress,” Microsoft wrote. “Beginning in August 2026, Microsoft Edge will start the consumer transition away from Manifest Version 2 (MV2) extensions and toward MV3. Our goal is to complete the consumer transition by the end of 2026, with enterprise deprecation following in early 2027.”
Microsoft said only 58 MV2-based extensions in the Edge Add-ons store have any meaningful usage, and only three of those lack a publicly available MV3 version. “Developers and users have spoken: the vast majority of extensions of all types—from password managers to VPNs to ad-blockers—have successfully transitioned to MV3 with no loss of customer functionality,” the company said.
How the rollout works
Starting in August, a subset of users with MV2 extensions installed see notices on the Manage Extensions page (edge://extensions) and on Edge Add-ons product pages. Developers who still have MV2 extensions get a notice in Microsoft Partner Center and direct outreach from the Edge team. The changes start in the Canary, Dev and Beta channels and broaden to Stable over the following months. Managed devices aren’t affected during the consumer rollout.
Options for uBlock Origin users
The Verge noted that people who rely on uBlock Origin can switch to uBlock Origin Lite, which is built for MV3. They can also move to Opera, which still supports MV2 extensions and says it will do so “for as long as it’s technically reasonable,” or to Firefox.
MV3 replaces the webRequest API, which let extensions inspect and block requests dynamically, with declarativeNetRequest, which uses predeclared rules. Browser makers cite security and performance. Developers of advanced blockers have said it limits the filtering they can do. Microsoft is urging developers still maintaining MV2 code to ship MV3 versions before the consumer cutoff.
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