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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

It is still not clear to me whether uBlock or uBlock Origin should be preferred. It seems that the original author of uBlock had a falling out with some contributors and decided to fork it and go do his own thing his own way with uBo. People assert that this makes it "better", but I'm not sure. I've tried both and they do appear to have substantially differing featuresets. Can anyone finally clarify the situation, and the pros/cons of each?

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Use uBlock Origin, see my other post. The author of uBlock Origin makes it clear that no donations are sought for the development of the extension. That is not the case with the other version.

Your post (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11622316) seems to address ABP v. uBo, not uBo v. uB.

Furthermore, non-solicitation of donations is a political reason to prefer uBo. I'm curious about the technical reasons. As a side note, I personally have no problem whatsoever with an extension creator soliciting donations as long as they're not doing so in a deceptive or annoying manner.

> I'm curious about the technical reasons.

uBlock hasn't been updated in almost a year. uBlock Origin is actively developed. uBlock has effectively had no significant changes or improvements since the uBlock Origin fork happened.

Fair point.

There's some background here which might be relevant. Another extension, AdBlock, used to have a policy against "acceptable ads." The author sought donations to keep development going, but later sold the business (and the users!) to an entity that immediately started allowing such ads through.

Maybe the author of uBlock Origin wants to make it clear that this can't happen here.

The donations are what caused the rift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock_.28ublock...

I understand that a political issue is what drove them apart originally. However, people continually assert that uBlock Origin is the better extension. Is there anyone who has done an objective, non-political comparison of their featuresets and/or technical properties to really evaluate which one is superior for end users?

I can say anecdotally, that I found plain uBlock more featureful for everyday usage, but I haven't done a thorough review. I currently use uBlock Origin.

For one thing, uBlock Origin is constantly being updated, while uBlock hasn't been touched in quite awhile[0]. The uBlock maintainer seemingly quit working on it so that he could work on a paid ad-blocker for iOS called Purify instead.[1]

[0]https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock [1]https://www.purify-app.com/

The uBo author, gorhill, is on HN, and lots of information about the split can be found with a few cycles of searching HN.

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