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According to the latest update, it’s happening again, and this time on Microsoft Edge. Remember how one of the best adblockers, uBlock Origin, was effectively killed by Google Chrome?
According to the latest update, now Microsoft says that it is following Google’s lead, and beginning that transition as well. Throughout 2024 and 2025, Google said that it was migrating its extension support from what is called Manifest, from version 2 to version 3.
According to the latest update, ads stink, and anyone who says that they don’t affect productivity has never turned off an adblocker and tried to surf a major media site, including our own.
According to the latest update, adblockers help reduce or eliminate those ads, keeping your PC running efficiently. Microsoft’s perspective is that the shift is one that will provide its Edge browser a “secure and performant extensions foundation.” Anyone who’s used the Web, however, knows that this is an issue of productivity: ads drag down performance, slow down your productivity, and even cut into the available memory your PC uses for other tasks.
According to the latest update, unfortunately, it still uses the older Manifest version 2 extensions, and those are on their way out. The uBlock Origin adblocker is my personal favorite, and the one I use when running Microsoft Edge.
As part of the ongoing story, “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.”. “With 95 percent of the top MV2 [Manifest Version 2] extensions on the Edge Add-ons store already moved to MV3 [Manifest Version 3], the ecosystem has made meaningful progress,” Microsoft said in a blog post on Friday.
The report highlights that over the next few months, Microsoft says, MV2 extensions will be gradually turned off by default. You’ll see this first in the Windows Insider channels — Canary, Dev, and Beta — and then transition over to the general-drop or Stable channel by the end of the year. Microsoft says that consumers and developers will be able to monitor the timeline here. There’s little that you can do.
As part of the ongoing story, microsoft believes that helps to secure the browser; extension makers believe that this gives them less insight into what’s going on. For adblockers, this lessens their capabilities and makes their protections more generic, developers have said. The transition between Manifest version 2 and Manifest version 3 tightens access to the browser from the extension’s perspective.
As part of the ongoing story, “The enforcement of this declarative approach disables advanced on-device protection and in turn will significantly limit innovation in the privacy space. Extensions will lose important tools and permissions that have previously allowed them to quickly react to fresh threats directly from the user device.”. “The most important limitation of Manifest V3 is the removal of extension access to the browser’s network layer,” Krzysztof Modras, the director of engineering and product at Ghostery, told my colleague Michael Crider in 2024.
According to the latest update, microsoft presumably isn’t technically obligated to migrate to MV3 extensions, but the post also noted that Microsoft has committed to an MV3 migration since 2020. Microsoft also said that there are currently only 58 MV2 extensions remaining inside Edge’s Add-on Store for extensions, and only three don’t have a publicly available roadmap to MV3. Remember, both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome are built upon Chromium, the foundation of most PC browsers save Mozilla Firefox.
According to the latest update, in previous coverage, we’ve included adblockers which still with Google Chrome. Those include uBlock Origin Lite, which is a Manifest Version 3-compliant version of the original uBlock Origin — but with fewer functions. It’s not clear whether those figures include uBlock Origin or not.
The report highlights that and so far, the recent version of the Vivaldi browser absolutely obliterates Web ads. There are other ways to block ads, of course, with anti-ad solutions which live at the system level like AdGuard or VPNs.
As part of the ongoing story, (I don’t like how Edge refuses to give up your stored data as easily as Chrome, however.) I can’t say for certain whether you’ll be safer under Microsoft’s fresh plan. Still, remember that the appeal of a free Web browser is just that — you should be able to migrate to a Web experience that you want to see, not one that is dictated to you. I tend to migrate between browsers fairly frequently, and the fact that they’re free certainly helps.
The report highlights that he has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Highly adopted Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room. Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology.