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Comment by abhinavk | Hacker News Reader

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abhinavk·

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

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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.

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

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