[farisjarrah]

Competition in any space is extremely valuable. If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a void to fill. Furthermore, competition drives innovation. A separate project may figure out a better or more efficient way to accomplish the same goals and they could potentially share their findings with the uBlock team or vice versa and everyone benefits.

[pythux]

This. It is exactly what happened about a year ago when this performance study[1] was published. In the months that followed, uBlock Origin, Brave and Adblock Plus all worked pretty hard on improving the performance of their content blocking engine, and used the benchmark and open-source dataset from the study to measure their optimizations.

The result is that now, all users of either of these extensions benefit from a better and faster product, thanks to emulation between competing projects. This would not necessarily happen in the absence of competition. In the end, users benefit.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the performance study)

[1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html

[StavrosK]

> If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a void to fill.

If for whatever reason uBlock Origin went away tomorrow there would be a fork. uBlock Origin is the second (or third, I forget) fork of the original project.

[pythux]

uBlock Origin is still almost exclusively maintained by the original author: Raymond Hill. He was already behind uBlock and is now working on uBlock Origin (the original uBlock being basically stale).

[aswan]

> Competition in any space is extremely valuable.

Sure, no argument there. But the original comment said that in this case it is "much needed", suggesting something more specific than just "competition is generally good".

Lots of comments here are making non-specific arguments that "competition" leads directly to improvements in products/technology. It seems to me what is missing here is a concrete idea for making an ad-blocker work better, not an avenue for making a new/different approach available. (In particular, the goals of this project seem to be much more about working around upcoming Chrome extension changes rather than about improving the behavior in some way)