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What uBlock can and can not (currently) do

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Gitoffthelawn edited this page Jun 19, 2015 · 5 revisions

"uBlock is just a stripped-down version of HTTP Switchboard".

uBlock started off by extracting the pattern-filtering engines (net and cosmetic filters) from HTTP Switchboard ("HTTPSB"). These engines needed more work to bring them to maturity. Most of that work won't be ported back to HTTPSB. See "The road ahead for HTTPSB" for details.

"The memory usage is not actually ABP's fault, EasyList has 40,000+ lines of rules that all have to be parsed by ABP".

uBlock also parses EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Malware domains lists, and Peter Lowes's Ad server list out of the box, yet uses less than half the memory of Adblock Plus ("ABP"), which is itself much more efficient than AdBlock (this is what gorhill stated he measured on Chromium-based browsers).

"uBlock has all the features ABP has!"

uBlock is its own thing, it doesn't try to be Adblock Plus or any other extension.

The $document filter option is not supported, see issue #405. When this was last checked, there were 13 $document filters in EasyList.

Note: Not supporting the $document filter option has nothing to do with uBlock being more efficient than ABP. It was a principle thing: the purpose of the $document filter option was seen as a way to disable a blocker on a specific site. Need supporting documentation if this is the only use the $document filter option.

"ABP has all the features uBlock has!"

uBlock offers you many features ABP currently does not have:

  • Extended filter syntax.
  • Local mirroring, a currently experimental but promising feature.
  • Dynamic filtering, the ability to point-and-click to filter on/off script and iframe tags, on a 1st- or 3rd-party basis. This is a key feature of uBlock.
  • Support of hosts files (hostnames are translated into the equivalent of ||www.example.com^).
  • Ability to whitelist a single web page, or a whole section of a web site.
  • Ability to not load cosmetic filters (saves a lot of memory), but this currently is applied to custom filters as well, which may not be ideal.
  • Ability to quickly determine how many hosts are connected and how many are blocked. These are both very important features.

"uBlock has a smaller memory footprint than Ghostery or Disconnect."

Last time anyone checked, uBlock had a larger memory footprint than both Ghostery and Disconnect. That was for each extesion's own memory footprint. No one looked into the contributions to the memory footprint added to each web page.

"uBlock has a smaller CPU footprint than Ghostery or Disconnect."

No one has reported any benchmark results regarding CPU footprint.

Keep in mind that uBlock, like Adblock Plus, Adblock Edge, Adguard, and some others, allows users to enter their own filters, something not possible with Ghostery or Disconnect.

uBlock, Disconnect, and Adblock Plus are licensed under GPL. Adblock Edge is licensed under MPL. Ghostery is licensed under a custom license.

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