Is there any justification for this beyond increasing Google's ad revenue?
uBlock Origin Lite still blocks ads on Chrome, but it's faster than uBlock Origin.
I don't expect Google's ad revenue has changed meaningfully at all, assuming people switch to uBlock Origin Lite.
Not even sure it's a valid comparison; are you even an ad blocker that can be compared with another ad blocker if you don't block ads properly. You can get a lot more speedup with an ad blocker that blocks nothing. Ad blocking speed would be 0 microseconds :P
See: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/08/new-doj-proposal-still-cal...
uBlock Origin is obv a great great extension and I'm considering switching to FF just for that one extension, but consider what some newfangled AI extension developed by a random dude can do to the webpage you're viewing - anything UBO can do! So I think they have a decent case but I wish there was a carveout for UBO