Chrome Manifest V2 Extensions Removed From the Web Store on August 31, 2026: What Actually Changed

Google's official Manifest V2 support timeline lists August 31, 2026 as the point at which all remaining Manifest V2 extensions are removed from the Chrome Web Store. That is a distribution milestone. It describes what the store hosts, not what the browser runs, and the distinction matters because almost every consumer-facing consequence of the Manifest V3 transition had already landed well before this date.^[1][3]

The browser-side cutoff was July 24, 2025. With Chrome 138, Manifest V2 extensions were disabled everywhere and users lost the ability to re-enable them, a toggle that had existed during the earlier transitional phase from March 2025. Anyone whose workflow depended on a Manifest V2 extension experienced the disruption then, over a year before the store listings were deleted.^[1][6]

What the store removal does affect is discoverability and deployment. When a listing is deleted, the page and its URL go away along with the review history and the visible install count. An extension identified only by its Web Store ID cannot be pushed to managed devices once that ID no longer resolves to a hosted item, which is the practical residue of the date for administrators rather than for individual users.^[3]

The Manifest V3 migration ran across more than four years of published milestones. The Chrome Web Store closed to new public and unlisted Manifest V2 submissions in January 2022 and to new private ones that June, meaning the catalog stopped growing long before anything was withdrawn. The active phase-out began on June 3, 2024, when Google started showing warning banners to users on the Beta, Dev and Canary channels.^[1][2]

Disabling reached the stable channel from October 9, 2024, initially as a staged rollout. By March 31, 2025 Manifest V2 was disabled across all channels while still offering an option to turn extensions back on. That escape hatch closed on July 24, 2025 with Chrome 138. The final step, deleting the leftover listings, was set for August 31, 2026.^[1]

The schedule shifted several times over its life. Google publicly postponed the content-blocker changes more than once in response to developer objections, particularly from authors of ad-blocking and privacy extensions whose designs depended on the blocking webRequest API that Manifest V3 replaced with declarativeNetRequest. The dates that eventually held are the ones in the official support timeline.^[1][5]

The most common misreading of this date treats it as the moment Chrome users must act, and some coverage framed it as a reason to consider switching browsers. The sequencing says otherwise. Chrome 138 disabled Manifest V2 extensions for all users in July 2025, and Google's timeline adds that existing installs on Chrome 138 or earlier continue to run but can no longer receive updates or be reinstalled if removed. Nothing changed in the browser on August 31, 2026. The population with something to lose on August 31, 2026 consisted of developers with orphaned listings and administrators referencing extensions by ID.^[1][3]

A second trap sits in the enterprise column. The ExtensionManifestV2Availability policy was the documented mechanism for managed fleets to extend Manifest V2 support past the consumer cutoff, and it was removed with Chrome 139, making Chrome 138 the last version where it functioned. Guidance that points administrators at that policy as a live workaround in 2026 is describing a control that no longer exists.^[1][6]

For anyone auditing what a deleted listing takes with it, the loss is not the extension binary on already-installed machines but the surrounding metadata. Reviews and install counts are part of how organizations evaluate an extension before approving it, so their disappearance removes the evidence trail even where a migrated successor exists under a different listing. Checking whether a replacement is published by the same developer account is the substantive step, rather than checking whether the browser still runs the old item.^[3][4]