Firefox: Adblock Plus lost millions of users in the past year
Adblock Plus is the most popular content blocking add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. In fact, it is the most popular add-on for Firefox by a large margin.
Its more than 14 million users beat second placed uBlock Origin by more than 10 million users right now. But things are not super great if you take a look at how Adblock Plus' user count developed over the past year.
A quick check reveals that the add-ons daily average user count and daily downloads are down. An average of 21.4 million users used Adblock Plus daily on September 29th, 2016. Additionally, the add-on was downloaded 181,000 times on that day alone.
One year later, daily users are at 15.4 million on September 27th, 2017, and daily downloads at 89,000. That is a decrease of about six million users in a year's time, and a drop in daily downloads by 92,000 when compared to the stats a year ago.
One could argue that Firefox usage may be down as well, and that the drop in daily users and downloads is caused by that more than anything else. But this would mean that other add-ons should see similar drops in usage.
If you take a look at the uBlock Origin statistics, the second most popular add-on on Mozilla AMO right now, and a content blocker as well, you will notice that the add-ons stats are up.
On September 29th, 2016, uBlock Origin had about 1.5 million daily users, and about 22,000 daily downloads. One year later, on September 27th, 2017, those figures rose to 4.1 million daily users and 55,000 daily downloads.
The add-on managed to more than double its user base and daily downloads in a year's time.
To be fair, uBlock Origin's daily downloads jumped shortly after September 29th, and have actually dropped heavily at the end of June and recovered only recently.
The huge uptick of downloads at the end of August seems to correlate with the release of the WebExtensions versions of uBlock Origin. Similarly, Adblock Plus managed to increase its daily downloads at around the same time, but both download counts did fall to previous levels shortly thereafter.
To come back to the initial question: why did Adblock Plus's daily user number drop by several million users while similar extensions did not see a drop but an increase instead?
Lets take a look at possible explanations:
- Adblock Plus's Acceptable Ads program might be a reason. While it is possible to disable the program in Adblock Plus, some users may have had troubles doing so, or made the decision to move to another content blocker instead.
- Rise in popularity of uBlock Origin which may have had an impact on Adblock Plus's performance. Interest in Adblock Plus dropped slightly according to Google Trends, but uBlock Origin interest increased only slightly however.
It is likely that uBlock Origin gained users who migrated from Adblock Plus to the new extension, but this does not explain what the remaining millions of users did. Could it be a change in reporting on Mozilla AMO?
Now You: What is your take on this development?
My problem with using Ublock Origin (or indeed the new version of Adblock Plus) is that they seem to have problems reading the “EasyPrivacy” list. What was once blocked by Adblock Plus 2.9.1 (and still is), like googletagmanager.com, is not blocked by either Ublock Origin or the new version of Adblock Plus 3.*, despite the list being ticked, and trying other items with it.
With Ublock Origin (or again Adblock Plus 3.*), Privacy Badger’s list (and Ghostery’s) seems to shoot up as if both Ublock Origin and Adblock Plus 3.* are not reading their subscription list(s) properly.
Also, where as Adblock Plus 2.9.1 blocked, say, 7 of 50 and also 8 hidden, Ublock Origin (or again Adblock Plus 3.*) only blocks say 5, no matter what I do.
I’m also really not interested, like some may be, in the fact that I’ve blocked 500 or 22% since installing installing Ublock Origin, as shown on the UI. I wish this statistic would be taken out or could be some how hidden.
Now it is late November. With the watered down WebEx version of ABP 3.0.x a lot of its Users are angry for it. If you read the posts in the forum there, there are many angry Users who are abandoning ABP or Firefox itself. Some even thought that the ABP developers purposefully downgraded the add-on. Some of them have no idea about the WebEx adoption of Firefox. There’s confusion. Not the fault of the current ABP because of the forced WebEx adoption, but this could also result to even more Users giving up on ABP. Some Users are just plain casual Users (or perhaps not some but the majority od Users) and have no interest in the technicalities of things.
Exactly. There seems to be a pre-conception here that everybody is as aware as themselves about the whole Web Extensions issue. The opposite is true. I’m sure the vast majority of Firefox users did not even know about the problem before the sky fell on their heads and most of their former add-ons were de-activated. Not everybody reads Ghacks everyday.
Mozilla seems to have deliberately planned to take ordinary users by surprise. There was no massive information campaign channeled through automatic updates, for instance. This is a big gamble.
There’s an assumption in the open software movement that you should be looking actively for technical information about your wares, and if you’re not, then it serves you right and you deserve your problems. Most people don’t think that way, have a normal life in-between using their computer, and couldn’t care a hoot about open, semi-closed or very closed software, as soon as it works.
So if they discover that it’s suddenly not working any more the way it did, they could legitimately become very cross. You know, the Microsoft scenario : I let the software update itself regularly because I’m a good boy and I’ve been told it will keep things in tip-top shape, and blam ! this update breaks everything.
I made the switch because of Ad blocks pulses mismanagement and unlocks intrigued me with purported elongated peanuts.
I switched to uBO because of the extended blocking syntax with :has :has-text :matches-css-before :style and :xpath.
Although for casual users (who I install uBO for) the ABP Element Hiding Helper was much easier with the widen and narrow principle for sure.
Also personally I liked the different filter groups better than one big list. But uBO with its performance and philosophy is just more convincing.
uBlock Origin is far better as it doesn’t sell adverts on the very system designed to block them. That being said; it does require you stick to a strict TOS, but it’s still kinda of redundant!
When an adblocker stops doing what is supposed to do – to block ads – it loses users. Thank ‘god’, there is uBlock Origin.
It’s not like the choice is only between the 2 add-ons being discussed here. I’ve changed to Adguard AdBlocker a couple of years ago and never looked back. It is lightweight, user-friendly, efficient and has recently been upgraded to web extention.
“Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program might be a reason.”
D’ya think?
I switched to Ublock because of the high memory consumption which Adblock would cause on my firefox installation. I never had to regret following my switch
Question about uBO – is anyone else also unable to update the filterlists hosted on githubusercontent.com, such as uBO’s internal lists (e.g. uBlock Privacy, Badware, Unbreak…) and various EasyList ones? GHUC.com has been unreachable for days now… Has gorhill switched to hosting lists somewhere else?
To all: after raising the above with gorhill, it looks like some UK users may have certain sites (e.g. githubusercontent.com) blocked by their ISP. This could be Sky’s Broadband Shield or the equivalent functionality with other ISPs. Disabling the shield (or whitelisting) solved my problem. It is not to do with uBO at all.
Does anyone have a recommended filter list for uBlock Origin? I know that the default settings are fine for 99% of users, but I would be curious to see how Fanboy’s Annoyance List compared to Adguard’s annoyance list, etc.
I have used both ABP and uOrigin, and both worked OK. No problems with either of them, except the resource usage seems to be higher than necessary, especially with ABP. A buddy at an IT company in Houston suggested I try AdFender. It wasn’t any better or worse then the other two, but it’s footprint was much lower. So my thinking is if I get about the same results, then try something that easier to use and less usage. It’s working for me.
I switched to uBO because of the performance too and I did it in 2015 or 2014, I think. So far so good, as I hadn’t much trouble with with uBO to think about switching back or to something else.
Running Firefox 56 with ABP now crashes and or locks up playing You Tube videos.
The acceptable ads was a minor concern for me since I knew how to disable. I jumped from ABP to uBO because of performance. At that time I was running Windows 7 on a Pentium 4 processor. The difference in performance was quite noticeable for me.
Today I am running a 4 core Xeon processor with hyperthreading and 16GB of RAM. So performance is not the key now. I find uBO’s approach to filter creation much better than ABP.
Could anyone point me to some resources relating to alternative or concurrent use of uBlock Origin, uMatrix and NoScript ? (Tutorials, how-to’s, comparative reviews, forum discussions…)
I have done several attempts at combinations. Right now, I have enabled NoScript plus uMatrix. However, I’m only actively using NoScript (whitelisting/blacklisting). uMatrix used to work at the beginning (it was mainly red), now it does not work anymore (it’s all green unless I activate it on a specific site, and then it returns to green). I don’t know what happened in between.
When multiple extensions hook “http-on-examine-response”, we lack a way to explicitly specify priority (order) of handling (order in which each extension receives an opportunity to modify the stream). The rule of thumb — and I can’t recall the last time I witnessed “an exception t the rule” — is that the browser grants priority (first dibs) to the hook associated with the most-recently-installed extension.
IIRC (i tested, but have forgotten), simply disabling / re-enabling a given extension will not restore its “first in line” status. Instead, to restore “first in line” status for a given extension, must uninstall the extension, then restart browser (even if the extension is marked “restartless”), then reinstall the extension.
Confusingly, and I guess you may realize this (but other readers might not) — when multiple extensions handle data from the (same) stream, the #2 and 3rd in line etc extensions may “count, and claim credit for handling” requests which have already been scrubbed/modified by the first-in-line chained extension.
With WebExtensions, all extensions are given the opportunity to examine and block all network requests, even those blocked by another extension. This means that if a network request to google-analytics.com is blocked by three webext extensions, they will all report having blocked it.
This is different from legacy extensions, which behaved as you say.
Conceptually: webext = parallel, legacy = serial.
Element Hiding Helper for ABP is more powerful and easier to use than uBO’s equivalent. The widen/narrow and other features make it very easy to remove clutter from Youtube and other popular sites. I could never get uBO to do the same with as little effort.
EHH is dying passing to the new webextension framework (firefox).
see https://adblockplus.org/blog/the-plan-towards-offering-adblock-plus-for-firefox-as-a-web-extension
“What about extensions like Element Hiding Helper, Customizations and similar?
Sadly, we don’t have the resources to rewrite these extensions. We just released Element Hiding Helper 1.4, and it will most likely remain as the last Element Hiding Helper release. There are plans to integrate some comparable functionality into Adblock Plus, but it’s not clear at this point when and how it will happen.”
The “new” ABP for firefox is essentially ABP for chrome.
uBo is much better than ABP.
ABP is still “seeing” the web like 10 years ago, blocking only classic ads, not dealing with inline scripts.
It’s comic reading “Sadly, we don’t have the resources”. Well, they have no resources ? :)))) What about R.Hill (gorhill) ? He does not accept donations either …
I’m using Waterfox which says it will keep the old extension framework. I am hoping that’s the case and that ABP and EHH continue to work on it.
I’d use uBO more if the element hiding were easier and more intuitive. EHH shows me exactly what will be blocked with a red rectangle. With uBO, I am trying to decipher CSS elements. Even if I manage to block what I want, it may be very specific to that one instance. Reload the page and some other ad appears there. That doesn’t happen with EHH.
I’m one of the switchers to Ublock Origin. Contrary to most who commented on the subject, I loved the idea of acceptable ads and wasn’t bothered in principle by ABP’s desire to earn income from advertisers. However, there followed a constant series of very negative reports of whitelisting solely on the basis of payment along with endless references to ABP being a resource hog while Ublock O. was supposed to be very light. In the end, I just decided to go with the majority in this case and made the change.
Of course I whitelist sites I like or ones that ask politely but I fear that greed in the form of very intrusive ads has ruined that income stream for the little guys. I’m surprised that condemnation of the acceptable ads idea has been so thorough and complete. Done correctly, it seems to me that it could have been a positive thing.
I only use uBlock Origin on different browsers (firefox & chrome) to block the ads. The performance of UBO is much better than others.
I wonder if the slowdown in downloads, particularly for ABP has something to do with the release of newer web browsers that already come with built-in ad blockers; Opera, Slimjet, & Epic to name a few. I’ve been playing around with all three, as well as FF & Pale Moon but have grown fond of the first 3 because of their effective ad blockers. And both Opera & Epic have built in VPNs. (I’ve also added a VPN to Slimjet with no ill effects. It’s still very fast.) I also use Privacy Badger for added security/privacy.
While none of these newer web browsers has a large amount of the market I wonder if added all together they have significantly contributed to the slow down in downloads for ABP and have also influenced uBO. Why download an extension when the capability is already built in?
Many years ago I used No Script and happily switched to ABP and eventually, based upon articles I read here at Ghacks, switched to uBO. Each time the switch was a vast improvement. Now, on some of my browsers, I don’t even need uBO.
Wonder what the point of the article is, especially when it isn’t backed by any objective relief that would provide a viable reason for the decline in ABP users. It’s a problem with reporting.
As it stands, if the article is an attempt to convert users to uBlock Origin, it fails miserable. Maybe it’s an emotional cry for help since gHacks readership numbers are at an all time low. Who knows.
What is really needed is a “Raymond CC” article that clearly represents the world of ad-blockers:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/2/
Exquisite reporting that would make most users switch to uBlock origin–not because of the “herd mentality,” but because it shows its superiority using the scientific method.
“What is really needed is a “Raymond CC” article that clearly represents the world of ad-blockers:”
From “Raymond CC”: “CNET is one of the biggest technology news (…) around and the download.com subdomain is a huge portal for software downloads.”
I really wonder what filters list “Raymond CC” is using with his adblocker, or even if he use one, as their “download.com subdomain” is one of the most dangerous site well known to infect millions of computers with adware/malware/trojans, blocked by most of the lists.
I switched because IMO uBlock Origin is better.
“What is your take on this development?” For me not a question of software, between Wladimir Palant and gorhill the choice was easy, two opposite philosophy. That’s why I really like the title of your article Martin.
“Acceptable ads” were never acceptable to me + Ublock Origin was significantly lighter
I have no problem with “Acceptable ads” as long as…
1. They are upfront about them to the user
2. I can disable them if I want to
Other than that, I don’t see the problem.
If anyone creates a simple how to to migrate from ABP to uBO and get it configured to a solid starting level, I would.
I find the uBO UI intimidating. I don’t mind tinkering and learning after setting it up but I want to make sure I can get uBO set up in the beginning to at least migrate my filter lists and custom filters from ABP and match what ABP was doing in terms of functionality before starting to learn it. My impression of uBO is that it is better than ABP but if not set up properly would end up being less effective and cause more issues. With ABP, I can just install it, uncheck the acceptable ads box, select my filter lists, import any custom filters or add them easily and be all set (minus unchecking a ton of the allowed iffy whitelisted exceptions that are in the shared filter lists).
What’s written in the article doesn’t seem to correspond to what’s shown in the charts.
1) Something major happened at the end of October 2016. ABP’s download counts dropped by about 50,000, and uBlock’s downloads increased by about 50,000. It might be a change in reporting, but since they moved in opposite directions, it’s hard to say how, exactly. I don’t see anything in uBlock’s releases around that time to have spurred a massive increase in downloads.
2) Contrary to what the article says, the increase in ABP downloads in August was only modest (+25%), and the decrease in uBlock downloads was massive (-50%). Again, no explanations there, though possibly related to a lot of uBlock users being on Nightly, and problems transitioning to WebExtensions.
In fact, if you look at the numbers, it looks like uBlock lost about 30k downloaders, while ABP gained 20k-25k downloaders. If uBlock ran into problems because of the WE changeover, it seems reasonable that people might have transitioned back to ABP for the time being.
3) The massive unexplained spike a couple weeks ago, which applied to both extensions. Possibly a bit of publicity from an article or promotion?
4) uBlock’s daily users has been flat since June, with just a small drop in July. This despite the significant drop in downloads in August (which looks like it might have started to affect daily users, but has since recovered).
It thus appears uBlock is in a steady-state position, where it’s both losing about 1% of its daily users on a constant basis, but also gaining them back in the 40k-50k download rate (ie: +1% dailly users).
ABP, meanwhile, if it’s losing 1% of its daily users, is losing about 200k per day. On the other hand, it’s only gaining about 100k per day, so is actually working at a net loss of 100k per day.
ABP, meanwhile, lost about 7m peak users between Nov 2016 and Sep 2017, which is an average drop rate of 23k per day. The loss has been accelerating since April, with a peak drop rate of about 33k per day between then and September, vs 13k per day prior to that. That vaguely corresponds to the Jan-April download rate of just over 100k, vs to the April-Sept download rate of about 80k, for a drop of about 20k per day.
That means a steady-state is a loss of about 0.5% per day, and needs an equivalent number of downloads to keep the total daily users stable. That means it has a better retention rate than uBlock Origin, which seems to need to replace about 1% of daily users per day.
Browser market share for Firefox has dropped from 7.26% to 5.86% from Nov 2016 to Sept 2017, according to StatCounter (the first google result I checked). That’s a 20% loss in users, if the total population remains static (may not be the case). That pretty well correlates with uBlock’s drop in downloads from 75k to 60k, but not quite on ABP’s drop from 125k to 80k (36% drop). Other adblockers might be cannibalizing some of those users.
Overall: ABP actually has a decent retention rate, but can’t sustain its total number of users in the face of declining Firefox marketshare and competitive extensions. There may be other factors involved, such as its model no longer quite fitting the needs of the userbase (eg: more granular 3rd party control). uBlock Origin has a weaker retention rate (it’s a more complex extension to use), but has a low enough total userbase that it’s able to maintain itself with the current download rates, even if it’s falling with Firefox marketshare as well.
> it’s a more complex extension to use
I disagree, it’s an install and forget extension: one can install and not need to configure anything afterward, the default settings are pro-users. Then you have a large button to disable on any given site as needed. How is that more complicated to use then ABP? You can you just tell someone to install uBO and tell them to leave it as is. With ABP, you will have to tell them to go into options, disable “Acceptable ads”, then for further protection, you might tell them to add EasyPrivacy, in which case they will have to go hunting for the list somewhere on the net. Add to this that uBO comes with features which lowers likelihood of broken web pages or working around anti-blockers (script:inject and redirect=), and again this simplifies its use by non-techie users.
Of course there is no point arguing about the usability of extra features found in uBO not found in ABP (dynamic filtering), and which are mostly out of view with default installation of uBO.
While I find uBO quite useful, there are things that I regularly have difficulty finding or figuring out how to get to work. For example, clicking on Options in the Addon Manager doesn’t take me to the options for the extension, but just the extension description page. Instead, I have to dig around trying to figure out which of the mostly meaningless icons will get me to the options page. (And the horrible experience of trying to open the dashboard from the extension description page.) I usually have to repeat this every few months, after I’ve forgotten how to get back to the options again.
And in terms of “making sure the page works”, it’s a lot closer to NoScript than to ABP. That’s fine for me, but is more complexity than my friends can deal with. And even the initial setup can be quite intimidating. I certainly felt like I was stumbling through it the first time I used it, and can imagine it to be a good deal worse for a new user.
It may not be a huge difference, but I can easily believe a daily discard rate that’s twice as high as ABP (1% vs 0.5%).
Note that this isn’t a complaint about the capabilities or features, only a note about the complexity of using the extension. If it’s hard to figure out how to make things work the way you want them to, that’s additional complexity. The examples above are only the most trivial, that are easy to describe.
I use ABP on a Mac. I haven’t had any problems with speed, and have had only a few sites block it. By using “open blockable items” it is possible to track down third party sites and block them. I admit I haven’t tried uBlock Origin – given the response in this forum, it must be great – but ABP works for me.
Both work. On AdBlocker Plus remember to NOT have it allow some sites, if speed is required. It is faster and uses less resources in the Block All Mode. I too use uBlock Origin mostly. I now use Vivaldi or Firefox on macOS.
I haven’t used AdBlock Plus since uBlock Origin was released. It is my primary extension on all of my browsers and is a virtual must to have a pleasant experience on the modern web.
The only browser I don’t use uBlock Origin is the Brave browser since that browser doesn’t support extensions and already has a built-in ad/tracker blocker and Safari since the Safari version of uBlock is junk. Wipr or Adguard are the content blockers I use when I dust off Safari.
The new Web Extensions api makes it difficult to keep up on FF today. Adblock Plus had to be rewritten, so did UO, but UO became more suited to the change I guess. Still crashed firefox with me so I went back to Noscript.
Martin, uBlock Origin on Chrome recently hit 10 million+ users, you should post about that too.
> The huge uptick of downloads at the end of August seems to correlate with the release of the WebExtensions versions of uBlock Origin
Martin, the huge uptick was quite certainly because of the article from Stiftung Warentest which reportedly favoured uBlock Origin:
https://www.test.de/Tracking-Wie-unser-Surfverhalten-ueberwacht-wird-und-was-dagegen-hilft-5221609-0/
I was made aware of this through someone on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/903362999783751680
I believe the release of the uBO/webext version to stable channel on AMO (roughly at the same time the article above came out) caused many departure from uBO because it ended up being afflicted by many issues in the WebExtensions framework, and by the fact that mixing legacy extensions with uBO seems to cause issues. This is documented in the wiki:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-WebExtensions#read-carefully-if-using-ubowebext
As Firefox development keep moving forward however, things seem to have stabilized now.
Another unscientific observation I have made is that it seems that when school season starts, there is an increased usage in ABP and probably now uBO as well given its wider adoption.
@gorhill
uBlock Origin is one of the best and most useful add-ons ever built. Thank you for such a great piece of software!
Gorhill, thanks for the input. So, the increase was mostly from users from German speaking countries?
Well now that you are asking… I am filled with doubts. This was my interpretation from the timing and size of the uptick.
It just occurred to me that if this was caused by the German article, then I should see similar uptick in download stats in the Chrome store, and I am not seeing this. So I guess you are right, it could be simply because of the webext release in stable channel.
One thing I forgot to mention is that the increased then decrease download rate around the end of 2016 and August 2017 respectively is most probably related to the fact that uBO was presented as the suggested blocker in Firefox’s “Get Add-ons” page.
This year, I went from Adblock Plus to uBlockO as well. I like UBO much better! Not only does it block adds but those pesky floating facebook/twitter/instagram icon things that I feel are distracting.
I, too, abandoned Adblock.
Ublock origin is much better! :)
I had switched from ABP to uBO not because of the former’s ‘Acceptable Ads’ (it’s a concept, arguable, and it’s removable), not for less used resources with the latter, but because uBlock Origin managed connections to 3rd-party sites. I had quickly enough discovered that if ABP handled nicely the ads, it handled them once downloaded but wouldn’t block 3rd-party sites according to the user’s directives in the first place. As soon as I discovered uBO on AMO (practically at its launch I guess) I knew it’d be love :) Reading the introduction on AMO made me realize how limpid, well thought the add-on was. Running it I found how well it was carried out, how intuitive using it was. I much appreciated the state of mind of its developer (as I felt it) in which his add-on seemed to fit perfectly. I never removed uBO, never even thought of it, it’s the main add-on for my browser, the very first I’d install. A gem.
An Adblock Plus decline? I share the possibilities mentioned in the article, I have no idea of the cause and if this fits in a general trend. But we all know that the Web has changed ever since ABP was launched and that the combat includes 3rd-party sites, scripts, even CSSs, fonts, data delivered to them via simple connection etc etc . Anyone who’s concerned by privacy (and security) should consider uBO. If the only bother is a screen filled with garbage then ABP still performs nicely even if not as well as uBO.
went to ublock as seems to work faster with less resource usage
A lot of sites, at least in the U.S., now complain if you have ABP & site features may be unavailable until it is disabled–a nuisance.
Also, both curves have been rather flat for a while now. Maybe ABP has stabilized now.
There has been a change in the way AMO counts users recently, and it led in some cases to some add-ons getting a decreased value. (Essentially the change is about not counting disabled add-ons and stuff like that, I don’t know the details)
Looking at uBO’s numbers and from my fuzzy memory, it sounds like June 2017 might have been the date of this change. We can see a small drop on ABP too.
As the others said, ABP uses too much resources, also personally I thought the interface was a mess. I gave up on it on my slow old PC and used BluHell and NoScript for a while, then I discovered uBlock Origin (on this website) and switched to it. And now I have uMatrix on all my browsers, thankfully I can export settings. I’m recommending uBlock to people, and even had someone recommend it to me – as if I didn’t already know. :-)
The drops in late June for both extensions were likely related to an AMO change in how users are counted: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/06/21/upcoming-changes-usage-statistics/
>but this does not explain what the remaining millions of users did
Moved to Chrome obviously. Why use chromified Firefox without addons when original Chrome is better?
>Why use chromified Firefox without addons when original Chrome is better?
Because I don’t want to give Google a direct pipeline everytime I log into the web. What I do is none of their business.
Chrome crashes several times a day. No other modern day browser does this. I have moved to Vivaldi and Edge mainly, but have kept my Firefox and Chrome handy as well. Firefox and Chrome are good for Sync to all devices.
I just am tired for the Ah Snap, Something Went Wrong ! on Chrome, using sites such as Cnet.
I’ve never used ABP. For a long time I used plain AdBlock … mostly for sentiment, because I liked the CatBlock April Fool’s Day prank. But lately I’ve shifted to uBlock.
I switched because Adblock Plus is a resource hog, even with just the bare basics (EasyList + EasyPrivacy). uBlock Origin, however, runs buttery smooth, no matter how many filters I enable.
I also switched for the same reason. Did some tests and there was a huge resource usage difference between the 2
I jumped from ABP to Ublock since acceptable ads were added to the former blocker. Also, the claim that Ublock uses less CPU and RAM resources helped a lot in the decision. Simple as that.
Never looked back since never encountered problem with Ublock Origin. I already use Fx 57 beta 3 and all of my 3 extensions I use, fortunately are web-ext already -including Ublock as you mentioned.