The Door Is Shut. Finally, Completely.

Back in February, I wrote about the ad blocker war and Manifest V3 — specifically how Google's MV3 framework wasn't really about security, it was about surgical removal of the capabilities that made ad blocking effective. I said that Chromium-based browsers were the most exposed, and I said Firefox and its hardened forks were in a better position because Mozilla hadn't gone down that road the same way. Four months later, we're at the end of that road. Chrome 149 shipped on June 2nd, and according to a discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo, it's the last version where any of the flag-based workarounds still function. The final flags are being pulled from the codebase now, scheduled to disappear with Chrome 150 (expected June 30) and 151 (July). PCWorld and TechSpot confirmed the timeline this week. "Weeks away, not months" is how TechSpot put it. Google engineer Devlin Cronin laid it out plainly: MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported…