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What µBlock can and can not (currently) do

Raymond Hill edited this page Aug 24, 2014 · 45 revisions

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

No. µBlock 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 details.

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

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

"µBlock has all the features ABP has!"

µBlock doesn't have a "Block element" entry in the contextual menu (right-click). The element picker can be used though to pick whatever element you do not want to see. Nobody asked for a contextual menu entry yet, so I don't consider it a sought-after feature, hence I didn't spend time implementing it.

Regular expression-based filters are not supported. At time of writing I see three such filter in EasyList, and none in EasyPrivacy. So rather uncommon. I may support them if there is really a need, but only for those which will have the domain filter option set: otherwise it's just impossible to implement efficiently such filters, and µBlock won't encourage their use by supporting these. For all the instances I have seen, it is possible to translate them into more efficient non-regex-based filters.

Filters with the $elemhide option are ignored. At time of writing, I see 50 such filters in EasyList. The purpose of these filters is to disable cosmetic filters on specific sites.

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

No it doesn't. Last time I checked, µBlock has a larger memory footprint than both Ghostery and Disconnect. That's for their own memory footprint. I didn't look into their contributions to the memory footprint added to each web page.

Regarding CPU footprint, I don't know, I didn't measure yet (maybe I will), but my hunch at this point is that the CPU overhead is higher than that of µBlock. I did run CPU benchmark a very long time ago, and this was the case -- but after such a long time, I have to assume things have changed and I would need to benchmark again -- a time-consuming task.

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

There are also other differences, or similarities: µBlock, Disconnect and ABP are licensed under GPL. Also, there is this.

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