Early last month, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo announced that its browser will integrate ad blocking for YouTube ads, powered by uBlock Origin. This month, Microsoft announced the opposite for its Edge browser, though it’s a move that’s pretty in line with the primary Chromium browser, Google Chrome itself. This means that it will be completely phasing out Manifest V2 (MV2) extensions for Manifest V3 (MV3) instead. But this means cutting off the better ad blockers like the aforementioned uBlock Origin.
As published on the Windows Blogs, Microsoft says that “95% of the top MV2 extensions on the Edge Add-ons store [have] already moved to MV3”. This leaves “only 58 MV2-based extensions … with any meaningful usage. Of these, only three don’t have a publicly available MV3-based extension already available”. The company then goes on to claim that “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”.
As a result, Microsoft will gradually be turning off MV2 extensions over the next few months. These changes will start with the Canary, Dev and Beta channels first, before going to the Stable builds. The company aims to complete “the consumer transition” before the year ends, with Enterprise to follow in early 2027.
Data notwithstanding, any serious ad-block user will tell you that the original uBlock Origin, a MV2 extension, is a lot more thorough in what it does. If there are any ads that its MV3 counterpart, uBlock Origin Lite, fails to block, there’s more than just a good chance that the standard version can. And in a world where malvertisement is so bad that even the US FBI recommends using ad blockers, completely turning off MV2 and by extension one of the most effective ad blockers just doesn’t sound like a good idea.
