Popular ad blocker uBlock Origin Lite pulled from Firefox store | Hacker News Reader

Popular ad blocker uBlock Origin Lite pulled from Firefox store

pcworld.com

10 pointsPhyskal9 comments

Someone posted yesterday and some discussions were made. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707418

uBlock Origin Lite (uBOL) was meant to mitigate the Manifest V3 (MV3) that Chrome/Chromium moved on to this year which severely hindered how an ad-blocker works. Apparently some people prefer uBOL over the original uBlock Origin (uBO) as it's less resource-intensive, especially in less powerful devices like Firefox on an Android.

After pulling from the Firefox add-on store (AMO), users can still receive updates from Github page, so no big deal for users I guess? Sideload it is somewhat more complicated so some users will not use it and some others may consider this a hazard and pull away from installing it.

I would not call an extension with 5K users, popular. Or did PCWorld confuse it with uBO?

So not the extension it sounds like?..click bait indeed

uBlock Origin Lite has 600k downloads on Chrome, a 4.4/5.0 review score, and it was released quite recently.

It is, essentially, uBlock Origin for ManifestV3, so if the author confused it for uBO, it wouldn’t be very wrong.

tl;dr: It is very popular, and very trusted.

This is reductive. It is the best a user can get on desktop Chrome, which isn't great compared to UBO proper on Firefox. There's maybe a reasonable argument for UBOL on Firefox mobile, where it is more performant than its big brother. There is no Chrome equivalent, because Chrome on mobile doesn't have an extension ecosystem or native ad blocking.

Ideally the Lite version of uBlock Origin provides the same protections as loading the traditional app without making any adjustments, requires no background JavaScript to run, has an even smaller memory footprint[1], and even alleviates potential privacy concerns as it doesn't require any network connections to function. Other Manifest V3 add-ons, like AdGuard, work more like uBO but also have deficiencies due to the way V3 treats those extensions as "second class citizens" of sorts.[2]

uBOL may be small compared to its full-fledged counterpart, but Firefox Mobile also has a much smaller browser market share compared to any other[3].

[1] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1748763311535948228

[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

[3] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

It was not very popular on Firefox though, because uBO works very well for years and there is no need to migrate to manifest v3 either.

uBlock Origin uses "ManifestV2" of a browser. Chrome is moving to "ManifestV3" and uBlock Origin has been adapted to work with ManifestV3 on Chrome.

The ManifestV3 version of uBlock Origin has some advantages and the author made recently it available as an option to the Firefox users as "uBlock Origin Lite". One advantage, it's lightweight. Works better on slower computers.

wasn't ubo lite a remedy for chrome users?

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