Why an extension you rely on suddenly stopped working
An extension that worked yesterday and does not today has almost always hit one of five things. They are listed here in the order they are worth checking, and the first one accounts for most of it right now.
1. It was built on a platform Chrome no longer runs
This is the common case at the moment. Chrome 138, released in July 2025, stopped loading extensions built on Manifest V2, and later releases removed the flags that could force one back on. The extension is still in your list, possibly still showing as enabled, and does nothing.
Look it up on our check page: if it says Manifest V2, that is your answer, and no amount of reinstalling will change it. Sometimes the developer published a rebuilt version as a separate listing under a similar name, which is worth searching for before you look for a replacement. We keep a list of the extensions still listed on the old platform.
2. It was removed from the store
A removed extension keeps working if it is already installed, but cannot update and cannot be reinstalled. If it vanished from your list entirely, Chrome may have disabled it. Our removed list covers what we have confirmed gone, and each extension's page records when we stopped finding it.
3. Chrome revoked its access
Open chrome://extensions, click Details, and look at Site access. Extensions can
lose access when Chrome tightens defaults or when a site changes address. Setting it back to the
sites you need often fixes what looks like a broken extension.
4. The site it works on changed
Extensions that modify a particular site — adding buttons, changing a layout, extracting data — break when that site is redesigned. Nothing is wrong with the extension; it is looking for something that is no longer there. This is fixed by an update, so check when it was last one: an extension untouched for years is unlikely to get that fix.
5. It changed hands
Extensions get sold, and the new owner sometimes changes what it does. If it still works but behaves differently, that is worth knowing. We record the publisher on every check, and an extension's page shows it if it changed while we were watching.
Working out which one
Paste the extension's store link into our check page. It will tell you whether the listing still exists, which platform it is built on, when it was last updated, and what it can reach — which between them separate the five cases above.