PSA: How to re-enabled legacy extensions (MV2) in Chrome such as Violentmonkey

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Since July 2025 Chrome has force disabled all extensions that are still using manifest version 2. This affects popular extensions such as Violentmonkey.

For the time being it’s still possible to easily re-enable them by setting two flags on chrome://flags

First enable “Temporarily unexpire M137 flags.”, then restart Chrome and afterwards you can set “Extension Manifest V2 Deprecation Unsupported Stage” to disabled:

Screenshot 2025-08-09 164515
Screenshot 2025-08-09 164515732×200 13.5 KB

You should then be able to re-enable MV2 extensions in Chrome that are still installed and make a backup of their settings. Afterwards consider switching to a MV3 based userscript manager like ScriptCat or Tampermonkey

However there are still some caveats for MV3 extensions that can negatively affect performance.

For more methods how to re-enable MV2 extensions see:

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MV2 and Violentlonkey still work on my two current setups:

  • Android 9 Firefox for Android latest
  • Windows 11 Vivaldi latest

But Vivaldi is based on Chrome so it should soon be affected too.

And Firefox will also migrate to MV3.

Maybe with less restrictions than Chrome.

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