What to Do Now That Microsoft Edge Is Phasing Out Ad Blockers?
If you use Microsoft Edge, you’ll soon discover that some older extensions, like uBlock Origin, no longer work. This is because Microsoft, following Google Chrome’s lead, is migrating to the Manifest V3 extension platform and disabling MV2 add-ons. Edge is built on Google’s Chromium engine, so this change isn’t unexpected, but it will impact users who rely on older ad blockers.
Microsoft is ending support for older extensions for Edge.
Microsoft recently announced that it will begin disabling MV2 extensions by default in the next few months, and that support for these add-ons will be completely phased out for most users by the end of 2026. (The transition for enterprise customers is expected to be complete in early 2027.)
Microsoft notes that 95% of MV2 extensions for Edge have already migrated to MV3, and fewer than 60 MV2 extensions remain in the Edge add-on store. These include uBlock Origin, which has an MV3 version, uBlock Origin Lite, but the latter is not as powerful as its predecessor and obscures content rather than preventing it from loading. AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, and AdGuard are other MV3 alternatives with Edge versions, although they are also not ideal replacements for uBlock Origin due to the content filtering limitations of MV3 ad blockers.
You can switch to other browsers with ad blocking functionality.
If you want to keep the ad-blocking features you’re accustomed to, you can ditch Edge (and Chrome) and switch to a browser not based on Chromium. Alternatives are also generally quite good from a privacy standpoint . One such option is Firefox , which runs on its own Gecko engine and still supports older ad-blocking extensions, including uBlock Origin. DuckDuckGo and Brave have built-in ad-blocking capabilities. Note that Opera, which is based on Chromium, has stated plans to maintain MV2 support for now, but this may be discontinued in the future.