As a content publisher, I hate ad blockers no matter how brilliant it is. But I also have to admit that as a content consumer, I love the cleanness of the website and enjoy reading more with no ads floating around. That’s why I still have Adblock Plus plugin installed and enabled on my Chrome browser, just to enjoy more while I am surfing the web reading the stuff that interests me.

While the Adblocker Plus works quite well, it does use quite a bit computer resources. In some occasions, it just failed to response and put the website in a halt. But since it was the best out there, I was just hanging in there waiting for a better one to emerge.

uBlock Origin is another Adblock browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Marketed itself as a wide-spectrum blocker, it’s not only an ad blocker but can also be used to block scripts, all 3rd party servers as well. Initiated in 2014, it’s still a new player in the market, but it has received a lot of praises from many technology websites and has over 4M active users in Chrome and over 1M in Firefox as of August 2016. It’s also an open source project still actively developed and maintained by the founder and lead programmer Raymond Hill.

You can load the Chrome version of extension from here and start enjoying the clutter-free website right away. The extension icon shows the number of ads blocked on the site you are visiting. When clicked, it pops up a box displaying a little more detail stats about the blocking.

Clicking on the power button in the box puts the whole website domain in the whitelist and ctrl-clicking on the button only whitelist the current page. There are also four icons available at the bottom of the box for you to toggle through some of the settings such as media content, popups, or remote fonts.

You can also right-click the extension icon and go to Options page to set up more settings like filters, rules, and whitelists.

Feature-wise, uBlock Origin provides all features required for an Adblocker with a nicely designed interface built around it. But what really makes it different from traditional Adblockers is its resource efficiency and lightweight, even with loads of the filters that need to be forced on the extension. Here is a quick comparison on the memory consumption of both Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin. See for yourself.

To see a more detailed comparison on both extensions, check out uBlock vs. ABP: efficiency compared.

uBlock Origin has extension ready for both Chrome and Firefox. As it claims on its project page, it has nothing to do with uBlock.org which is an older branch of the same project that is no longer under development.