Mozilla's massive lapse in judgement causes clash with uBlock Origin developer

[harlan4096]

Software developers who publish their products on third-party stores face all kinds of problems sometimes. From rejected apps or extensions to removed products or unjustified claims about them.

Raymond "gorhill" Hill, maker of the world's most popular content blocker uBlock Origin received two emails from Mozilla recently about his Firefox add-on uBlock Origin Lite.

Good to know: uBlock Origin Lite is a Manifest V3-compatible version of the content blocker. It is less powerful, but since Google is disabling Manifest V2 support in Chrome, it is what will remain from uBlock Origin for Chromium-based browsers.



Mozilla says that it has reviewed the extension and found violations. The following claims were made:

• The extension is not asking for consent for data collecting.
  
• The extension contains "minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code".
  
• There is no privacy policy.
  

As a consequence, Mozilla disabled the extension on the Firefox Add-ons Store.

Hill refuted all three claims that Mozilla made on the GitHub repository stating that the extension is not collecting any data, that there is no minified code in uBlock Origin Lite, and that there is a privacy policy.

He admitted further that he does not "have the time or motivation to spend time on this nonsense" and won't react to the allegations made or appeal the decision.

In a follow-up, Hill criticized the "nonsensical and hostile review process" that put added burden on developers. Mozilla disabled all versions of the extension except for the very first one. It still flagged the extension for the very same reasons, but nevertheless decided to keep the outdated version up.

Does it affect uBlock Origin?

The core extension remains available for Firefox. Unlike Google Chrome, Firefox will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions. Mozilla has not flagged this extensions or disabled it.

Hill is now self-hosting the extension uBlock Origin Lite for Firefox on the GitHub repository. Interested users find it on the releases page as a direct download.
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