Chrome's last loophole for the real uBlock Origin closes this summer

What Chrome actually switches off, and when

Google's Manifest V2 wind-down has a date attached now. Per Chrome's own deprecation timeline, the platform permanently disabled MV2 for all users in Chrome 138 in July 2025 and stripped the user-facing toggle. The enterprise override policy went in Chrome 139. The remaining lifeline was a command-line flag that power users kept passing to Chrome to revive MV2 extensions — and that is what closes this summer: Chrome 150 (June 30, 2026) removes the primary ExtensionManifestV2Disabled workaround, and Chrome 151 removes the last flags after it.

The casualty everyone names is the same one: the original uBlock Origin. It depends on the webRequest blocking API that Manifest V3 deliberately narrows. The MV3 replacement, uBlock Origin Lite, ships with a smaller, pre-declared rule set and cannot filter as aggressively. On Chrome, Lite is now the ceiling.

"Why are people on HN still using Chrome?"

The discussion's most interesting turn wasn't anti-Google boilerplate — it was a confession about lock-in. The challenge came first:

"Why are people on HN still using Chrome? (or Edge, or Opera…)" — dotcoma

The answers were not about preference. They were about sites that quietly assume Chrome:

"I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs … but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites" — a two-decade Firefox holdout

"Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around. It's a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites." — ano-ther

A principal front-end engineer in Brisbane summed up the compromise most people land on: the work laptop forces Chrome, "But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else."

The catch that makes Firefox not a clean escape

The obvious advice — "just switch to Firefox" — came with an asterisk a long-time user supplied:

"Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later. BUT. Chrome then will still have uBlock Origin lite. Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store." — TiredOfLife

Brave, for its part, told users it will keep MV2 working for a short allowlist — AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, uMatrix — rather than across the board.

The thread's bleanest comment was its bitterest. Richard W.M. Jones, the Red Hat engineer behind libguestfs, pointed at Google's own creed:

"Surprised they still have this page on their site … 6. You can make money without doing evil."

Another regular's reply was a single instruction: "Archive it before they memoryhole it."

What changes for you, concretely

If you run Chrome with the original uBlock Origin via a flag, that setup stops working at the next two updates — plan the migration now, not in July. Your real choices narrow to three: accept uBlock Origin Lite's reduced blocking on Chrome, move ad-blocking to a browser that still ships the full extension (Firefox, Brave), or push filtering down to the network (Pi-hole, a filtering DNS). The era of "install Chrome, install uBO, forget about it" is the thing actually ending.