August 13 News: Edge Announces Deprecation, Firefox Says “Not Going Away”
On August 13, 2026, tech outlet PCWorld reported a piece of news that might sound quiet to general users but carries profound implications for hundreds of millions: starting this month, Microsoft Edge is gradually dropping support for legacy browser extensions. The world’s most popular ad-blocking extension, uBlock Origin, is among those affected. By the end of this year, Edge users will essentially no longer be able to use it.
On the exact same day, Firefox officially responded on Bluesky: “Our support for uBlock Origin isn’t going away.”
This was not mere corporate posturing. Looking across the entire browser landscape, Firefox is indeed the last major browser still offering full support for the extension. Apple’s Safari doesn’t support it, the DuckDuckGo browser doesn’t support it, and Chrome—used by nearly two-thirds of global internet users—certainly doesn’t. In fact, Chrome has been systematically phasing it out since 2023.
Consider a detail worth pondering: uBlock Origin is the world’s most widely installed ad-blocking extension—boasting over 29 million active users on Chrome and more than 10.6 million on Firefox (Wikipedia data, June 2026), making it the most popular extension on the Firefox Add-ons store. It is free, open-source, collects no user data, and is primarily maintained by a single independent developer, Raymond Hill.
Yet the party pushing it into a corner happens to be the world’s largest advertising company.
Image: Official Firefox browser logo. Source: Mozilla (via PCWorld)
Google: Both Player and Referee
Consider two sets of numbers.
According to Statcounter data from July 2026, Google Chrome commands roughly 68% of global browser market share, followed by Safari at ~16%, Microsoft Edge at ~5%, and Firefox at around 2%-3%. Crucially, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, and others are all built upon Google’s open-source Chromium engine. When Google changes rules inside the core engine, it effectively changes rules for nearly all browsers worldwide.
Now look at another set of figures: Google’s parent company Alphabet generated $402.8 billion in total revenue in 2025, with the vast majority coming from advertising—roughly three-quarters based on recent financial filings. Search ads and YouTube ads represent its two largest revenue streams.
Stacking these two sets of numbers together exposes an inherent conflict: a company deriving three-quarters of its revenue from advertising holds the rule-making authority over the vast majority of web browsers worldwide. And those very rules dictate the survival of tools designed to block ads for users.
Based on public statements and architectural shifts, this conflict of interest is virtually impossible to bypass—and it has remained a central point of debate across global developer communities for years.
How Extension Ad Blockers Work: The Neighborhood Security Guard
To grasp the weight of this rule change, one must first understand the underlying mechanism.
When you open a webpage, it looks like a single document. Behind the scenes, however, your browser sends requests to dozens of different servers for images, scripts, fonts, analytics code, and more. A substantial portion of these requests goes directly to ad networks and tracking companies.
What uBlock Origin does can be likened to a security guard at a gated community entrance. The guard holds a constantly updated blocklist—tens of thousands of rules specifying which servers belong to ad networks and which URLs are known trackers. Whenever the browser attempts to issue a network request, the guard checks the list first. If there is a match, the request is blocked instantly. The ad code never even downloads to your computer, meaning it won’t display, won’t slow down your browser, and won’t harvest your browsing history.
This blocklist is maintained by global volunteer communities—which gives uBlock Origin the backing to stay free, ad-free, and committed to never selling user data. Public community documentation highlights another critical aspect: ad blocking provides tangible security value. A significant amount of malware is distributed via ad networks (malvertising). By blocking ads, uBlock Origin objectively shuts down a major vector for malicious software.
The Rule Change: Replacing a Real-Time Guard with an Advance Pre-Approved List
Starting in 2023, Google began enforcing a new extension specification in Chrome (known in technical circles as Manifest V3) while gradually deprecating the older Manifest V2. Microsoft Edge began following suit this month, targeting full deprecation by the end of 2026 (with enterprise editions slightly later). On the surface, it looks like a routine version upgrade, but the changes strike at the core of how ad blockers operate:
Under Manifest V2, extensions could inspect and modify network requests in real-time as they occurred (webRequest API), updating rule sets on the fly like a dynamic guard responding to evolving conditions.
Under Manifest V3, the browser requires extensions to submit a static rule list in advance (declarativeNetRequest), leaving the browser itself to handle blocking according to that list. Extensions can no longer dynamically inspect individual network requests or fetch updated rule code from remote servers.
To use the analogy: the security guard is still standing at the gate, but he can only operate according to a paper list printed last month. Updating the list requires formal review, and the list length is strictly capped.
The result is clear: old and static ads are blocked effectively, but new techniques and dynamically generated ads (such as mid-roll video ads on streaming platforms) inevitably catch the blocker off-guard. While a Manifest V3-compliant version called “uBlock Origin Lite” exists, its functionality is severely stripped back. Community consensus indicates that users notice a distinct lag in response—where the full extension could block new ad formats within days, the Lite version takes much longer or fails altogether. Developer Raymond Hill has repeatedly stated he refuses to endorse Lite as a full replacement and continues to maintain the complete version.
Image: uBlock Origin in the Chrome Web Store displaying “No longer available”. Source: Michael Crider / Foundry (via PCWorld)
Google’s Arguments Also Make Technical Sense
To be fair, Google’s architectural shift did not happen without cause. The browser extension ecosystem has suffered serious security incidents over the years: popular extensions being bought out by shady actors and quietly injected with malware or tracking code. Google’s stated rationale is that tightening extension permissions, banning remote code execution, and delegating rule evaluation directly to the browser engine makes malicious extensions harder to operate while rendering the browser faster and more memory-efficient. Microsoft offers a similar narrative—aiming to give Edge a “secure and high-performance extension foundation,” noting that 95% of top store extensions have already migrated, leaving only 58 legacy extensions behind.
Engineers generally agree that these arguments hold merit: consolidating network permissions back into the browser core reduces the overall attack surface.
However, critics raise a direct counter-question: if security were the sole motive, why were ad blockers the primary casualty? Why was full uBlock Origin tolerated on Chrome until 2026 before being handed a delayed sentence? An engineer from Ghostery (another veteran privacy company) put it bluntly in a 2024 interview: revoking extensions’ access to the browser’s network layer effectively disables the ability to “rapidly respond to new threats on-device.” Most technical observers view security as a genuine factor and commercial interest as another; the two are not mutually exclusive, though official announcements seldom acknowledge the latter.
The Cat-and-Mouse Game Continues, But the Battlefield Is Shifting
Another widely discussed reality is that Firefox holds only 2%-3% of global market share. Calling it the “last fortress” carries far more symbolic weight than practical market influence. Furthermore, there is a subtle irony: Firefox’s parent entity, Mozilla, relies heavily on revenue from its search partnership with Google (where Google pays to be Firefox’s default search engine). Even this “last fortress” has its financial lifeline tied to Google. Public information shows this relationship dilutes the purity of Firefox’s independence, yet it has not prevented Firefox from making a fundamentally different technical choice.
The cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and ad networks will not end simply because extension rules changed—it is merely shifting battlegrounds. System-level DNS filtering and built-in browser blockers (such as those in Brave or Vivaldi) are stepping up to fill the void. From an engineering standpoint, the ceiling for extension-based ad blocking has indeed been lowered, but user demand will not evaporate. As long as online advertising relies on data collection and behavioral tracking, users will seek ways to defend themselves.
A Final Take
Taking a step back, the rule changes have undeniably lowered the maximum capabilities of extension-based ad blockers—and whoever sets browser specifications controls that ceiling height. Google has legitimate grounds to improve browser security models; users have legitimate reasons to resist pervasive ad tracking.
For average users, the choices over the next year or two remain straightforward: stay on Chrome or Edge and accept the stripped-down Lite version; switch to Firefox to keep using full uBlock Origin; or run no blocker at all and accept unskippable ads as the toll for free web content. That choice itself is what users have left. What it is worth depends on how much value you place on your own browsing privacy.
Reference Links:
- PCWorld: Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin (Main coverage with Firefox official response)
- PCWorld: Microsoft Edge is about to lose uBlock Origin, too (Microsoft deprecation timeline and background)
- Wikipedia: uBlock Origin (Chrome and Firefox active user data)
- Statcounter: Browser Market Share Worldwide (July 2026 browser market share)
- Alphabet Q4 2025 Earnings Report ($402.8B annual revenue and ad revenue breakdown)
