Today I reinstalled Firefox and instantly went to reinstall uBlock Origin Lite, but I couldn’t find it, which was very confusing. Here is what I found:
This really sucks 
For those who use uBO Lite, you can get it from GitHub, it will automatically update itself too.
While I do not defend Mozilla’s dumb decision, uBO Lite on Firefox makes no sense. It’s far too neutered, and Firefox has retained support for Mv2 webRequest APIs. What I see in terms of using it is :
The pros : Permissionless
The cons :
I value my security more than content filtering, uBO Lite is more than enough for me.
It’s also worth mentioning that uBO Lite works per-site, so you can have full content filtering capabilities on sites like YouTube and then use the permissionless mode on sensitive sites, so uBO Lite actually makes more sense than regular uBO.
Totally agree. I used to dislike uBlock Origin Lite due to its limitations, but after reading this, I made the switch which I had no regrets for.
Exactly. I followed PrivacyGuides’ recommendation for using Optimal or Complete mode when Basic mode’s filtering is inadequate.
I use the default lists, and enable what I actually need when visiting websites. (Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN, AdGuard URL Tracking Protection, EasyList - Cookie Notices, Overlay Notices, and Other Annoyances.)
I’ve seemed to notice that the current release of uBlock Origin Lite is unavailable for Firefox. I’m certain I saw it when this version released, I took notice of this issue after encountering the same issue as you.
The most recent of uBlock Origin Lite for Firefox is two releases before the one in the first screenshot, as the previous release is the same version as the one before it. (See second screenshot.)
While I sympathize with the author of uBO, at least to my understanding, this seems like simply a mistake (and one that seems to have been rectified by Mozilla). As consumers, we want to have extension and app stores that are moderated to some degree to prevent some of the worst bad actors from easily adding malicious extensions. However, to do that moderation takes a ton of work, often by volunteers (from what I understand), so it makes sense that mistakes will occasionally be made, especially since Mozilla does not have the kind of resources Google does. While the author is completely within their rights to put (or not put) their extensions on whatever platform they would like, I feel like occasional issues such as this one kind of come with the territory of developing extensions for browsers.
100%. Software auditing is a hard tough job, especially when done by volunteers. Even paid auditing by Play Store isn’t able to catch it all, it’s absurd to expect no false positives from volunteers.
But I can see how that can be frustrating at developer level. Especially since you’d expect specialized stores like browser addon stores to have specialized volunteers.
The only thing coming out of these frictions is loss for the end user who will now have to depend on one more channel for their use case.
A mistake, and one that seemingly only lasted a little while before being acknowledged and remedied.
One thing that is important to remember about Gorhill and uBO, is that he is very protective of his right to use his time and energy how he wishes. And not feel obligated to break his back over what he considers to be a passion project. This is a primary reason why uBO is not only non-profit, but won’t even accept donations. and frequently turns down offers for donations and suggests people donate to the filterlist maintainers instead. He really values his independence and autonomy.
Part of this means getting to allocate his time in the way that he sees fit without feeling beholden to anyone whether that be sponsors, or users/donors. And uBOL began as a reluctant project of necessity (uBO ‘minus’) due to Google’s limitations with MV3 (it has since evolved into something more than that “uBOL” which has pros as well as cons and its own design goals independent of uBO) but I don’t think it is Gorhill’s passion to the extent uBO is. In that light, I can understand (though not necessarily agree with) his decision to pull uBOL from Firefox over what appears from the outside as a rather trivial and minor issue that was resolved quickly and professionally.
I am almost certain he would not be so quick to pull the plug if this were uBO instead of uBOL. But that is his prerogative. He has a fairly strong personal preference for uBO and a pretty strong preference for Firefox so that is probably where his primary focus will remain (particularly when you consider that uBOL came into existence to address a chromium specific problem, and considering how tiny the userbase of uBOL on Firefox was (0.007% compared to uBO))
Also note that it seems the review process that is being discussed refers to Firefox recommended extensions, this is a small subset (less than 0.5%) of total extensions, that are subjected to greater scrutiny and vetting. These are the extensions Firefox promotes, and to some degree vouches for. It is a good thing that this subset of ‘recommended’ extensions receive greater scrutiny before being approved, and a very occasional and temporary false positive seems like an acceptable tradeoff. Normal extensions are not vetted to the same degree.
Actually, exactly because of a small subset of total extensions that are subjected to greater vetting, I don’t understand the conclusions of AMO review team either:
It takes only a few seconds to see how this is nonsensical – keep in mind that this “was manually reviewed by the Mozilla Add-ons team”:
If anything, it just means that the reviewing process is not that great of scrutiny and vetting. I even suspect, some of these review processes are automatic than manual. The code line to review for the faulty files above is… 50 lines.
I totally understand code auditing is a hard job, but I only understand if the tricky codes are the complex ones. For these I can’t understand.
He pulled the extension out because AMO team themselves remove all but the first, very out-dated version on AMO. That’s a huge bug and security risks for any new users installing uBOL. Pretty sure he’ll do the same if uBO gets the same treatment.
Also for who thinks enabling per-site makes more sense, then no. Some of the abilities that are not possible under Basic mode is removing tracking parameters, which is why the whole AdGuard URL Tracking Protection list is greyed out in that mode, because that whole list cannot be used without further permissions, and that list is recommended by PG itself. Enabling per-site does not make sense in these cases, since the tracking parameters are already loaded before you can manually choose to higher modes.
Not really related to permissions, but another feature is the ipaddress= which protects against 0.0.0.0 exploits, is not available for uBOL either.
This appears to be a knee jerk reaction, but maybe there is more behind the scenes the author was frustrated with. I suspect it was likely some automated system issuing a false positive.
The Firefox’s add-on review process need to be grilled not just for the incompetence (they later admitted the review was inaccurate according to Gorhill) but the negligence at which they carried out this review including arbitrarily disabling the uBOL extensions.
If any users who prefer to use uBOL extension on Firefox suffers, just like the uBlock users who suffer mv2 deprecation in Chrome, they should lay the blame squarely on the browser.
What really sucks is there isn’t much of an alternative, and complaining to the corporation feels like yelling at the clouds. Sadly removing the extension is now just a barrier to entry for installing this extension (for non tech literate users).
It seems like Gorhill ended uBlock Origin Lite support for Firefox completely. The screenshot below is the most recent release of uBlock Origin Lite. On Firefox, I’m still on one from three releases ago
Gorhill has said he would put it back on AMO if volunteers due the QA.
If any of you really like uBlock Origin Lite concept, then I encourage you to say you are ready to volunteer on Github. It’s just testing if filters work properly.
Thanks for posting that! Btw, it’s not just testing if the filters work properly. Please read Gorhill’s comment again, unless I understood it incorrectly.
You are right, I simplified it a bit. Requirements 1) 2) are trivial, while 4) could be complicated.
