Manifest V2 ends August 31. Audit your browser extensions.
Chrome pulls all remaining Manifest V2 extensions from its store on August 31, 2026, and Edge started its consumer shutdown. What breaks on your team's machines.
There is a hard date on your calendar that nobody put there. On August 31, 2026, Google removes every remaining Manifest V2 extension from the Chrome Web Store, and Microsoft has started the same shutdown in Edge. If your team runs a password manager, an ad blocker, a screen recorder, or some internal tool built as a browser extension, this is the two-week window to find out which side of the line it is on.
What actually happened
Chrome's Manifest V2 shutdown has been running for a while — MV2 extensions were disabled by default in March 2025 and disabled across all channels by July 2025, with the ExtensionManifestV2Availability enterprise policy retired at Chrome 139. The August 31 milestone is the last one: remaining MV2 extensions come off the Chrome Web Store entirely. Anything still installed on Chrome 138 or earlier stays put but can never be updated or reinstalled (Chrome for Developers).
Microsoft posted its own timeline on August 7. Edge begins retiring MV2 extensions for consumers this month, starting in Canary, Dev and Beta and widening to Stable over following months, aiming to finish the consumer transition by the end of 2026, with enterprise deprecation in early 2027. Managed devices are exempt from the consumer rollout. Microsoft says 95% of the top MV2 extensions on Edge Add-ons have already moved to MV3, with only 58 MV2 extensions left carrying meaningful usage (Microsoft Edge Blog). Firefox and Brave have both said publicly they intend to keep MV2 extensions working (Neowin).
Why the Manifest V2 deadline matters for your business
Two failure modes, and the second one is the expensive one.
The obvious one: an extension your staff depends on daily stops updating or vanishes. Annoying, survivable, mostly a helpdesk afternoon. The 95% migration figure means most commercial extensions are fine.
The one that bites is the extension you built. Small businesses commission browser extensions constantly — a scraper that pulls order data off a supplier portal with no API, a form-filler for a legacy vendor system, a quick internal tool from three years ago. Those never got a migration budget because nobody owns them. MV3 is not a version bump either: background pages become service workers, webRequest blocking is gone in favor of declarative rules, and remotely hosted code is out. Those are real rewrites, and they hit exactly the glue code holding a manual workflow together.
Do this in the next two weeks. Inventory what is actually installed across your fleet — Chrome and Edge both expose this through management policy, and if you have no management layer, that is the more urgent finding. Flag anything you commissioned. For a store-listed extension, check the developer shipped MV3. For anything custom, get an honest estimate now rather than in a January outage. And if an extension exists only because a vendor has no API, treat this deadline as the prompt to ask them for one — or to move that workflow somewhere you are not one browser release away from downtime.
Key takeaways
- August 31, 2026: all remaining MV2 extensions are removed from the Chrome Web Store — no updates, no reinstalls
- Edge began consumer MV2 retirement in August 2026, targeting completion by end of 2026 and enterprise deprecation in early 2027
- 95% of top Edge MV2 extensions already migrated, so commercial tools are mostly fine — custom ones are the risk
- MV3 is a rewrite for anything using blocking
webRequest, background pages, or remotely hosted code - Inventory installed extensions across your fleet now; treat an extension that exists only because a vendor lacks an API as a workflow to move
An extension holding a workflow together is a dependency on someone else's release schedule. We replace brittle browser glue with integrations that run on your own infrastructure and survive a platform deadline. See what we have rebuilt, or send us the extension you are worried about.
Sources: Chrome for Developers, Microsoft Edge Blog.
- #browser-extensions
- #manifest-v3
- #chrome
- #edge
- #it-operations
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
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