Comment by nnethercote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnethercote | Hacker News Reader

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[Here's a comment that I made on this topic on my blog back when this was discussed in July, which is still relevant. The numbers have probably changed a bit, but I doubt enough to affect my point. (The link is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-w...).]

I’ve seen variations on this comment many times in discussions of this post. It’s totally wrong-headed.

Here are the usage stats for these add-ons:

- AdBlock Plus: 20.3 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...)

- uBlock: 0.22 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock/statis...)

- uBlock Origin: 0.08 million daily users (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...)

There are ~70x as many AdBlock Plus users as there are uBlock users. Unless you personally convince all 20 million AdBlock Plus users to convert to uBlock, they won’t see any benefit. (And good luck explaining to them the uBlock vs. uBlock Origin split! What a mess that is.) Meanwhile, when Firefox 41 comes out in September, all 20 million of those AdBlock Plus users will immediately benefit, without having to lift a finger, thanks to Cameron’s patch.

Sometimes it’s worth thinking outside the tech elite bubble (the one where “everybody knows uBlock is better”) and thinking about ordinary users in the real world (where most people haven’t even heard of uBlock).

Adblock Edge also still has 0.71 million daily users despite the fact that it is no longer maintained. (The maintainers recommend uBlock Origin instead.) That's more than all of the uBlock add-ons combined.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...

As a long-time Adblock Edge user, thanks. It's a shame they don't have a mechanism to alert users about that.

In the past, it was not uncommon for me to update Firefox, try to figure out why an add-on stopped working, and only then realize that the add-on in question hadn't been maintained for more than a year.

If the maintainers of ABE really want their users to switch to uBlock, they could push a final update that displays a notice about its own deprecation. There's no need to rely on the app store to do that.

But they're not doing it, and I suppose it's because even without further updates, ABE will continue to work perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to the article, it will work even better than before.

I still don't get if I should be using ublock vs ublock origin

https://www.ublock.org/faq/

is ublock origin a single developer?

ah this helps a tiny bit more

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...

but also adds more confusion as to which one to use

Thanks for the data. As another uBlock user (who does not care about the split by the way) and as someone who is not a tech-bubble elite, I can tell you with much confidence, that there is no such thing as "ordinary users" when it comes to Adblocking.

I don't know man, plenty of people are fed up with ads (installing adblock isn't really technically challenging) and now there are plenty more non-tech people using adblock because of Apple.

I install AdBlock plus on all my family member's machines. That, and I also install NoScript.

They're ordinary users, and they use adblocking without even knowing it.

Noscript? It is a bold move to break more than half of the internet for them. Did they learn to use the Noscript-menu when something does not work?

Yes, I taught them what to do if the website doesn't work. They're surprisingly adept now at only accepting domains that look trustworthy, selectively. My parents being 60+ years old, I'm also amazed at it...

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