Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Both uBlock Origin and its smaller sibling, uBlock Origin Lite, are experiencing problems thanks to browser vendors that really ought to know better.

Developer Raymond Hill, or gorhill on GitHub, is one of the biggest unsung heroes of the modern web. He's the man behind two of the leading browser extensions to block unwanted advertising, the classic uBlock Origin and its smaller, simpler relation, uBlock Origin Lite. They both do the same job in significantly different ways, so depending on your preferred browser, you now must make a choice.

Gorhill reports on GitHub that an automated code review by Mozilla flagged problems with uBlock Origin Lite. As a result, he has pulled the add-on from Mozilla's extensions site. The extension's former page now just says "Oops! We can't find that page". You can still install it direct from GitHub, though.

The good news is that the full-fat version, uBlock Origin, is still there, so you can choose that. Hill has a detailed explanation of why and how uBlock Origin works best on Firefox. It's a snag, though, if like The Reg FOSS desk you habitually run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker.

That's because, as The Register warned back in August, Google's new Manifest V3 extensions system means the removal of Manifest V2 - upon which uBlock Origin depends. For now, it still works - this vulture is running Chrome version 130 and uBO is still functioning. It's still available on Google's web extensions store, with a slightly misleading warning:

So, if you use Chrome, or a Chrome-based browser - which is most of them - then you will soon be compelled to remove uBO and switch to uBlock Origin Lite instead.

It would surely be overly cynical of us to suggest that issues with ad blockers were a foreseeable difficulty now that Mozilla is an advertising company.

To sum up, if you have a Mozilla-family browser, uBlock Origin is the easier option. If you have a Chrome-family browser, such as Microsoft Edge, then, very soon, uBlock Origin Lite will be the only version available to you.

There are other in-browser ad-blocking options out there, of course.

Linux users may well want to consider having Privoxy running in the background as well. For example, on Ubuntu and Debian-family distros, just type sudo apt install -y privoxy and reboot. If you run your own home network, maybe look into configuring an old Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole.

uBlock Origin started out as a fork of uBlock, which is now owned by the developers of AdBlock - which means that, as The Register said in 2021, it is "made by an advertising company that brokers 'acceptable ads.'"

If acceptable ads don't sound so bad - and to be fair, they're better than the full Times-Square-neon-infested experience of much of the modern web - then you can still install the free AdBlock Plus, which is in both the Mozilla's store and in the Chrome store. ®