This article is a non-comprehensive comparison between the two most popular adblockers: uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus.
Platform Support
Both uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus support all the major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera.
Adblock Plus is also available for Android Devices as a native Android app(Adblock Browser) and browser extensions (for Samsung Internet and Safari).
Both uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus don’t have an active support for Internet Explorer. For those of you who are still on IE for compatibility reasons, an alternative would be AdGuard.
| Browser | uBlock Origin | AdBlocker |
|---|---|---|
| Google Chrome | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Edge | Yes | Yes |
| Safari | Yes | Yes |
| Opera | Yes | Yes |
| Firefox | Yes | Yes |
| Android | No | Yes |
| iOS | No | Yes |
Ad Blocking Efficiency
While both uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus handle instrusive ads flawlessly, uBlock seems to be a bit better, as it’s constantly getting updated to fight againsts new advertising techniques.
Adblock Plus enables their “Acceptable Ads” program by default – which basically is a program that lets selected advertisers pay to get through the adblockers. Due to this program, users may still see ads after installing Adblock Plus, unless they reconfigure and turn off “Acceptable Ads“.
Another thing to take into account is “adblockers detectability”. These days, many websites deploy some kind of “anti adblocker” script to detect and ask the user to temporarily disable them. In this regard, uBlock Origin and its community handles them extremely well. If you encounter an “anti adblocker” message, simply subscribe to uBO Annoyances List and it should go away immediately. Adblock Plus seems to be slower on updates.
System Resource Usage
If you’re occasionally browsing the web from a portable device, you should take memory consumption of adblockers very seriously.
Among a field crowded with a wide range of adblockers, uBlock Origin stands out as one of the best available when it comes to memory usage. Numerous independent benchmarks have shown that uBlock saves up to two-thirds of the memory usage, compared to Adblock Plus.
User interface
Both uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus interface have only a single button to enable or disable them, and both provide you some statistics about the number of ads blocked, as well as access to advanced settings when needed.
Adblock Plus seems to be slightly better in terms of easy-to-navigate UI for newbie. But again, uBlock Origin is not that hard to use.
To be fair, it’s a tie in this regard.
Privacy
While neither adblocker has been shown to leak user data, AdBlock Plus have been pretty controversial about their “Acceptable Ads” program (RIP: Adblock Plus). I personally prefer privacy tools with honest business models from known organizations.
uBlock Origin, on the other hand, are vetted by thousands of users and software developers all around the world. If there’s something shady about uBlock Origin, we should all knew it by now.
Conclusion
While both adblockers perform an outstanding job of removing those irritating adverts from every site you visit, they differ in how they do so. If you want a quick lightweight adblocker that you can install and forget about, uBlock is the way to go. AdBlock appears to be a slower alternative but offers support for Android and legacy browsers. In either case, you can’t go wrong with either of these, as long as you know how to configure them properly.
