AdGuard CTO Says Chrome’s Ad Blocker ‘Apocalypse’ Never Arrived
AdGuard CTO Andrey Meshkov published a blog post this week pushing back against widespread claims that Google’s Chrome browser has effectively killed ad blocking.
His message: the predicted apocalypse never arrived.
Meshkov’s post addresses the panic surrounding Chrome’s phase-out of Manifest V2 — the technical framework, or extension API, that allowed browser add-ons to intercept and filter web traffic. Chrome versions 150 and 151 are stripping the final compatibility workarounds that kept legacy extensions such as uBlock Origin functional.
That narrowing window sparked alarm across the web. Even so, Meshkov said the doom narrative is overblown.
“Ad blockers are very much alive,” he wrote.
How Chrome Got Here
The conflict traces back to 2019, when Google moved to clean up the Chrome Web Store after a surge in malicious and low-quality extensions dragged down browser performance.
Google introduced Manifest V3 as a replacement. The original MV3 design would have gutted the deep filtering capabilities that ad blockers depend on, replacing them with a new declarative net request API — a system where extensions submit filtering rules for the browser to execute, rather than running their own code directly.
Developers pushed back hard. Over the next five years, Google worked directly with the extension developer community to address those concerns, including attending annual ad blocker developer conferences and joining the W3C WebExtensions Community Group alongside Apple and Mozilla.
That sustained collaboration, Meshkov said, gradually shaped MV3 into a workable platform.
That said, the transition still raises the bar for developers building and maintaining filtering tools. Most everyday users, though, will install a modern MV3-compatible ad blocker and notice no difference at all.
Third-Party Browsers Take the Hardest Hit
Meshkov pointed to third-party Chromium-based browsers — those built on Google’s open-source browser engine — as the real casualties of the shift.
Browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Opera relied on the same legacy MV2 codebase that Chrome is now actively removing. Smaller browser development teams lack the resources to maintain that complex code independently.
Opera has already responded by aggressively promoting its built-in native ad blocker. The move reflects a broader industry pivot away from extension-based filtering toward browser-native solutions.
Firefox Remains a Full-Capability Option
For users who want the older, more flexible filtering architecture, Meshkov pointed to Mozilla’s Firefox as a direct alternative.
Firefox continues to support the full webRequest API, which gives extensions the deep network-level access that MV2 provided. Brave also runs its own native ad-blocking engine, independent of the Chrome Extension system.
The Ladybird browser, currently in development, has separately partnered with Brave to integrate its native ad-blocking technology.
Meshkov’s broader point is that browser makers retain real options to support robust ad blocking — they simply need to commit to doing so.
Google began formally discussing the MV2 deprecation timeline with developers as far back as 2020, and the W3C WebExtensions Community Group has continued meeting regularly since its formation to align browser vendors on extension standards.
