The world's biggest ad company just pulled uBlock Origin from its store
On September 1, 2026, Google removed the last Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store. uBlock Origin was one of them.
If you use Chrome and you have an ad blocker, this is the day the shelf it came from stopped existing. Google removed all remaining Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store — Manifest V2 being the older rulebook that decided what an extension was allowed to do inside your browser. Among the removed extensions is uBlock Origin, which the article that broke this describes as one of the most capable and widely respected content blockers ever built for the web.
If it is already installed on your machine, it stays. Google's own wording is blunt: extensions installed on Chrome 138 or earlier "will remain installed, but will be unable to receive any updates and cannot be reinstalled from the Chrome Web Store once removed from Chrome." So you keep it until you don't — a new laptop, a fresh profile, a cleanup, and it's gone for good. Developers of the affected extensions were told by the Chrome Web Store team.
Anyone who has ever installed an ad blocker and then forgot about it — which is most people reading this. Students and young workers who live on a cheap laptop and a phone: your blocker keeps working right up until the day you reinstall the browser or get a new machine, and then the web looks very different. Also people who use Brave, Vivaldi or other Chromium browsers and never realised their extensions come from a store Google runs — they just lost the shelf too, even if their browser still supports the old rules.
Watch Brave. Its team decided to host four MV2 extensions on its own backend — AdGuard, uBlock Origin, uMatrix and NoScript — and let users switch them on inside the browser. Whether that list stays at four, and whether any other Chromium browser builds its own shelf, is the thing to follow. Google named no further steps in this announcement, and no dates for anything beyond the removal.
Nobody had to ban ad blocking. The store simply stopped carrying it, and the old copies stopped getting updates. That is how defaults change: not by a rule you can argue with, but by a shelf that quietly empties while your existing copy still works.
Sources: Web Iterate, "Google Has Removed Manifest V2 Extensions From the Chrome Web Store, Including uBlock Origin", September 1, 2026; Hacker News (top).
Крупнейшая рекламная компания мира окончательно убрала из своего магазина главный блокировщик рекламы и трекеров — миллионы людей увидят больше рекламы и будут больше отслеживаться, а альтернатива осталась только в обходных браузерах вроде Brave.
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