proximer / ublock

µBlock - An efficient blocker for Chromium-based browsers. Fast and lean.

µBlock for Chromium

See releases page for recent changes. See Wiki for more information.

An efficient blocker for Chromium-based browsers. Fast and lean. Written from scratch. Development through benchmarking.

µBlock is not an "ad blocker", it's a blocker in the broad sense, which happens to block ads through its support of Adblock Plus filters. EasyList, EasyPrivacy and Peter Lowe's Adservers list are enabled by default when you install µBlock. Many more lists are readily available to protect yourself from trackers, analytics, data mining, and more ads.

µBlock: page loaded. ABP: page still loading.

^{Image excerpted from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJr4hmPlgQ.}

Chromium on Linux 64-bit


Opera 22 on Windows 7 32-bit

^{The screenshots above were taken after visiting links in reference benchmark plus a bit of random browsing. All blockers were active at the same time, thus they had to deal with exactly the same workload. Before the screenshots were taken, I left the browser idle for many minutes so as to let the browser's garbage collector kicks in. Also, after a while idling, it's good to open the dev console for each extension and force a garbage collection cycle by clicking a couple of times the trashcan icon in the _Timeline_ tab (this caused a ~15MB drop for µBlock and Adguard in Opera) as garbage collectors sometimes work in a very lazy way, so I did this for each extension.}

Being lean doesn't mean blocking less.

^{For details of benchmark, see µBlock and others: Blocking ads, trackers, malwares.}

Installation

From the Chrome store, the Opera store, or manually.

To benefit from the higher efficiency, it is of course not advised to use an inefficient blocker at the same time. µBlock will do as well or better than the popular blockers out there.

Also of interest: About the required permissions.

Documentation

I think it is pretty obvious, except for this I suppose:

The big power button is to disable/enable µBlock for the specific hostname which can be extracted from the URL address of the current page. (It applies to the current web site only, it is not a global power button.) The state of the power switch for a specific site will be remembered.

About

µBlock is born out of HTTP Switchboard. All the niceties of HTTPSB have been removed, and what is left is a straightforward blocker which support EasyList and the likes, and also support host files. Cosmetic filters ("element hiding") are supported.

There is nothing more to it. But it does what popular blockers out there do, at a fraction of CPU and memory usage for the same blocking power. Also, no unique user id and no home means no phoning home (some popular blockers do this, just be careful).

Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought.

Actually, as the extension is becoming more popular, there is only one thing I ask: If you like the extension, please, please do not succumb to blind fanboyism. I want this project to stick to objective, intellectually honest measurements and reproducible benchmarks, not on arguments which can't be backed up under scrutiny or worst, pulled out of thin air. Remember: Development through benchmarking.

Without the preset lists of filters, this extension is nothing. So if ever you really do want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which were made available to use by all for free.

You may contribute by helping to translate this project. I created an entry on Crowdin, where you may contribute to the translation work.

License

GPLv3.