Microsoft has put a firm date on its long-expected extension cleanup, announcing that Edge will begin moving consumers off Manifest V2 extensions this August with the goal of finishing by the end of 2026. Enterprise machines get a little more time, with that deprecation slated for early 2027.

This isn’t exactly a shock since we’ve seen this coming for a while. Google has been walking this exact road with Chrome for a while now, and it recently locked in August 31 as the final date to pull MV2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Edge is essentially following the same path, just a few steps behind.

Most of the transition on Edge has quietly already happened, with Microsoft saying 95% of the top MV2 extensions on its store have moved to MV3 and the leftovers are now down to a handful.

Microsoft says that there are “only 58 MV2-based extensions in the Edge Add-on Store with any meaningful usage.”

Just three of those don’t already have an MV3 version sitting on the store, so for most people this is a change they probably won’t even notice. This is the same MV3 shift that pushed classic uBlock Origin out of reach on Chrome, when Chrome 150 stripped out the key flag and 151 shut the door on the workarounds.

Edge users can expect notices to start appearing this month on the ‎_edge://extensions_ page and on Add-ons listings for anyone with MV2 extensions installed. MV2 extensions will then get switched off by default over the following months, with Microsoft pointing people toward MV3 replacements where they exist.

The rollout begins in the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels before reaching everyone on Stable, and managed work devices are being left alone for now.

Whether this bothers you really comes down to which browser you use, because Microsoft frames the move as a win for security and performance, the same reasoning Google has leaned on.

Meanwhile, Brave has confirmed your MV2 extensions aren’t going anywhere since it now self-hosts the ones it supports, and Opera stepped in to clear up the confusion by pointing users to its beefed-up native ad blocker that sidesteps the extension rules entirely.

Anyone who mainly cares about ad blocking can check our roundup of how Brave, Firefox, and others are lining up as alternatives to Chrome, and now Edge, as they keep pulling away.

Edge users relying on an old MV2 extension should check whether an MV3 version exists and install it before the old one gets turned off, which it already has for nearly everyone.

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