Google isn’t actually killing your ad blocker, at least according to AdGuard CTO Andrey Meshkov, who just published a new blog post telling everyone to calm down about the Chrome Manifest V2 phase-out.

We reported earlier that Chrome 150 and 151 are stripping away the final workarounds keeping classic extensions like uBlock Origin alive. So the panic around this move has been speading like wildfire, with many people also under the false impression that ad blockers are completely dead. This is why Meshkov thinks the doom is completely overblown.

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Screenshot from AdGuard CTO’s post

This whole situation really started back in 2019 when Google wanted to clean up the Chrome Web Store. The store got flooded with malicious extensions and junk that slipped through poor moderation. Google also wanted to fix low-quality extensions that dragged down general browser performance. They introduced Manifest V3 to replace the older system.

The original version of MV3 really would have destroyed ad blockers completely. Google stripped extensions of their deep capabilities and tried to soften the blow with the new declarative net request API. Of course, developers pushed back hard. Google then spent the next five years working directly with them to fix the mess. The company started attending the annual ad blocker dev conferences and joined the W3C WebExtensions Community Group alongside Apple and Mozilla. They noted this long collaboration slowly turned MV3 into a genuinely workable platform.

Still, there’s no denying that his transition makes things harder for developers trying to build and maintain their products. Regular users will probably just install a modern MV3 ad blocker and never notice a difference.

Meshkov made his stance perfectly clear. He wrote “ad blockers are very much alive” and confirmed the predicted apocalypse simply never arrived.

He also pointed out that the real victims of this massive shift are third-party Chromium browsers. Chrome is actively ripping out the old legacy code that ran MV2 extensions right now. Browsers like Edge and Opera relied heavily on that exact codebase to keep their older extensions working.

Still, browser makers have already begun to adapt. We recently covered how Opera is aggressively pushing its built-in native ad blocker right now. Those smaller browser development teams simply don’t have the resources to maintain the complex MV2 code on their own.

Users who absolutely demand the old and flexible filtering capabilities still have a major alternative. Mozilla continues to support the full webRequest API in Firefox, according to Meshkov. Plus, we previously also looked at how Brave and Firefox are handling this exact transition using their own native engines. And other browsers like the upcoming Ladybird browser is also shaking hands with Brave for its native ad blocking tech.

This means that any browser maker out there still have options to support ad blockers. They just need to make a concerted effort to do so.

The post Thought Chrome killed ad blockers? AdGuard’s CTO says otherwise appeared first on PiunikaWeb.