Counterarguments

This page is just a place for me to collect my counterarguments when I spot something which I believe deserves countering.

Who cares about efficiency, I have 8 GB

I heard this argument from apologists of bloated software frequently. I decided to give this counterargument a dedicated page.

Just use a hosts file

uBlock Origin (uBO) supports the parsing/enforcing of hosts files and ships with a couple. One of them, "Peter Lowe’s Ad server list", is enabled by default.

Using a hosts file at the OS level rather than the uBO level is the better solution for lists of malware domains since these malware-linked domains would be blocked system-wide, and all applications would benefit from it.

However, for lists of domains linked to ad servers, trackers, analytics, etc., this is not a good solution: You can not easily un-break web pages with a hosts file at OS level.

With the hosts file under the control of uBO, it is possible to un-break websites. A user can disable uBO for the website that breaks or create an exception filter to counter the blocking of a specific hostname appearing in a hosts file.

Many of the exception filters in "uBlock filters" are exception filters to counter entries in the hosts files shipped with uBO.

I want the project to be committed to fully supporting the hosts files that ship with uBO. Report any issues from using these, and the appropriate exception filters will get created.

I use all of these hosts files, and so far, not much breakage has occurred.

uBO is a fork of Adblock Plus (ABP) code

No. The code is wholly original and written from scratch. There are very few places I borrowed code from elsewhere, and these have identification. For example, for the element picker, I embedded CSS.escape from Mathias Bynens (because Chromium did not at the time support CSS.escape).

Adblock Edge is as light as uBO

No, it is not. Adblock Edge is like ABP but without the "Acceptable ads" exception filters out of the box. See for yourself: here [via archive.org] is a diff of a code change for Adblock Edge, and here is the same exact diff for ABP. The timestamps show that Adblock Edge pulled code changes from the ABP project.