Google Chrome

Google Chrome will remove older Manifest V2 extensions in August

Ben Schoon | Jul 8 2026 - 8:35 am PT

The death of Manifest V2 extensions on Google Chrome has been going on for well over four years at this point, and the end finally has a date. August 31 is the official and complete end of older Chrome extensions.

Manifest V3 is positioned as a more secure, better-performing base for browser extensions going forward, but it also carries restrictions that affect certain extensions, such as ad blockers. As such, many have wanted to keep the door open on these extensions, but Google officially disabled support in July 2025, more recently stripping away a loophole that let users still re-enable older extensions.

Now, Google is providing an actual date for the end of the road on Manifest V2 extensions.

As of August 31, 2026, Google will remove all Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store. These extensions were already barred from being added to the store for the past few years, but the backend ability to deliver updates remained available. That’s what’s going away in August.

Advertisement - scroll for more content

While users will still be able to have these extensions installed, assuming they were installed prior to Chrome 138’s release last year, they won’t get updates or be able to reinstall them from the Chrome Web Store. So a new laptop or reinstalled browser will no longer be able to use those older extensions.

Google says:

All remaining Manifest V2 extensions are removed from the Chrome Web Store. Manifest V2 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.

This August 31 date hadn’t been previously confirmed, with the folks over at PiunikaWeb tracing the addition of this paragraph to sometime over the past 2-3 weeks.