Adblock Plus overtaken by uBlock Origin as the most popular Firefox extension
Ad blocking extension uBlock Origin has overtaken Adblock Plus when it comes to popularity on Mozilla Firefox. Strikingly, this is not due to a strong increase in uBlock Origin users; Adblock Plus has actually lost a lot of users.
The progression of the popularity of the two extensions, which are the most popular in Firefox’s extension store, can be seen at Archive.org. It can be concluded from this that the lead that uBlock now has was achieved sometime after January 12, 2022. The two extensions have just over five million users, according to Mozilla, and the difference in number is several hundred thousand.
If you go back in time, you will see that uBlock Origin has not really moved. Archive.org on this page can go back to 2018 when Adblock Plus had 11 million users and uBlock Origin just under 5 million. UBlock only makes a slight increase in the following years and Adblock Plus loses about six million users during this entire period.
Why Adblock Plus is losing users and uBlock Origin is not is not immediately clear. What is known is that the Firefox browser as a whole is losing users. Between January 2019 and early 2022, roughly the same period as discussed above, Firefox lost about 30 million monthly active users. Perhaps it is more often Adblock Plus users who switch to another browser and that uBlock Origin users stay where they are.
The differences between the two extensions are not very big. The main difference to consider is that the German Adblock Plus maker eyeo works with an acceptable ads system; some ads it doesn’t filter by default, because they’re “respectful, non-intrusive, and clearly identified.” It’s free for smaller companies to get on that list, but large companies have to pay, which is eyeo’s primary source of income. UBlock Origin does not have a revenue model.
Another difference is that frugal use of system resources is a priority for uBlock Origin. For example, it sells itself in descriptions of the extension and fairly recent benchmarks from uBlock developer Raymond Hill himself and others support that. Those benchmarks did take place on Chrome.