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uBlock ad blocker and unwanted behavior

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wraith808:
I've been using uBlock for my ad blocker in Chrome for a while.  The memory footprint and cpu usage is a lot less than adblock plus, and it works well.  But recently, they added something where they block urls in requested popups by killing the tab.  It opens up the tab, then kills it.  And it's very hard to disable if you actually *want* to go to the link without disabling it for that entire domain.  So you end up not being able to click in e-mails to go to the location, even if you don't care- without potentially disabling it for those ones that directly use that domain.

Does anyone know how to disable the killing of tabs with uBlock?  I haven't been able to find it...

wraith808:
I figured it out.  It's the difference between uBlock Origin and uBlock.  Someone forked the extension, and it shows up before, so I guess at some point I installed it instead?  But it doesn't make sense as I haven't really uninstalled and re-installed extensions- especially on all of my machines.  More if I find out more.

Jibz:
As far as I know, the original author of ublock transferred ownership to someone else recently, and there was a dispute afterwards about some actions taken (something about taking credit for the extension). ublock origin was an attempt by the original author to rectify the issues he saw, but perhaps they solved it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437182
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/130

wraith808:
I'm still confused, however.  I never installed ublock origin from what I remember.  Just one day, the icon changed.  And then a little after, the behavior changed.  And that's when I took notice.

How did I get something else completely installed?  Unless they just completely changed the extension and name, then the functionality?  It seems like that is what happened... and for whatever reason... it appears shady.  There should be no way to completely change both the name and the extension without the extension being disabled until you re-confirm it so you know what happened.

mwb1100:
I'm still confused, however.  I never installed ublock origin from what I remember.
-wraith808 (May 08, 2015, 01:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

The original developer of uBlock (gorhill) transferred control of the uBlock repo to the new project maintainer, but did not transfer the Chrome store version. See https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/commit/6850fa0a262b8772a502c92750fe7a5bf74515f0#commitcomment-10530255

As mentioned in that comment thread, gorhill intended from the start to fork uBlock, creating his own version which he would only work on for the few features he wanted.  Since he kept the Chrome store version, I assume that if that's where you installed your Chrome extension from, any updates gorhill made to it based on the uBlock Origin 'fork' would be installed into your browser whenever Chrome decided to pull the update from the store.

In other words:


* gorhill published uBlock on the Chrome store
* you installed uBlock from there
* gorhill changed the software at that Chrome store extension site to be uBlock origin
* your chrome browser updated your extension to uBlock origin

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