There's something clarifying about this moment with Chrome and Manifest V3, but the clarity cuts in a direction most people aren't looking. The Electronic Frontier Foundation flagged the quiet detail that Google has trackers installed on 75% of the top one million websites. And in 2024, Google's advertising revenue came in at $264.59 billion. That is the entire context you need to understand why a browser built by an ad company is making it structurally harder to block ads. You don't need a conspiracy theory when the business model is this transparent. The core of the change is the replacement of the webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API. In plain terms: before, your ad blocker could inspect traffic as it happened, dynamically, in real time. Now, extensions must contain all the code they will run, and are required to request permission from Google for the changes they can implement in your browser. You are handing the referee a rulebook that the referee helped write. The final support for MV2 extensions was removed entirely for general Chrome users by mid-2025. If you were still running an MV2 extension, Chrome disabled it, and you can no longer re-enable it. This is not a warning. It already happened. The move worth making is simple. Mozilla confirmed it would support both MV2 and MV3 concurrently, and Firefox retains the full functionality of the original webRequest API, which is what made the best ad blockers so effective in the first place. Brave has built-in ad blocking integrated directly into the browser, so it doesn't rely on the extension APIs affected by MV3 at all. You are not powerless here. You just have to be willing to move. The browser is not neutral infrastructure; it is a product built by a company with a $264 billion reason to ensure you see ads. Treating it like neutral infrastructure is the only real mistake.
‼️ Google is about to disable all adblocker extensions in Chrome. Instead of letting the adblocker inspect traffic itself, extensions now have to hand Google's browser a limited list of filtering rules and hope for the best. This leads to weaker blocking and more ads getting through.
Google makes the vast majority of its money selling ads. The company that profits from every ad you see also controls the browser most people use, with Chrome 149 being the last version supporting adblockers.
For example, under the new rules, uBlock Origin cannot exist. For millions of people, that extension is the only thing standing between them and a wall of ads, trackers, and autoplay garbage. One user put it bluntly: "The web is literally unusable without uBlock Origin."