uBlock Origin Extra

» see github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Raymond Hill put the ending at the top of the README, dated to the day. "As of October 20, 2020, uBO-Extra is discontinued and is no longer present in the Chrome Web store. Instart Logic's anti-user agent technology appears to have gone away and consequently the extension has become useless, as its main purpose was to foil Instart Logic's 3rd parties obfuscation technology." He archived the repository four days later.

It was never a standalone product. uBO-Extra was a companion to uBlock Origin, written for Chromium browsers only, because the technique it existed to break was only ever deployed against Chromium. It had no settings and no interface. There was an icon in the toolbar whose entire function was to remind you the thing was switched on, and the README told you how to hide it if the reminder annoyed you.

The release history stops well before the obituary does. Ninety releases between May 2016 and 8 September 2019, when version 2.88 shipped, then thirteen months of nothing at all. The store row records one more event after that, on 20 October 2020, and the event is the withdrawal.

~ the case file ~

~ what instart logic did ~

Instart Logic sold web performance to large publishers, and part of what it sold was a way to make a site's third-party requests stop looking like third-party requests. Hill's description in the README is blunt about the consequence: the technology disguised third-party network requests as first-party ones, "including the writing/reading of third-party cookies as first-party cookies". The part he kept returning to is that this reached past ad blocking entirely. A reader who had never installed a blocker, and who had gone into the browser settings and switched off third-party cookies, was having that setting quietly routed around.

The second half is what makes it hard to write about even now. The obfuscation watched for the developer console, and when it detected the console was open it stopped completely. You could not look at it directly. The detection code only worked on Chromium, so Firefox was served a different page and never needed an extension like this at all. The only reliable evidence came from people who sat down and read the shipped JavaScript line by line. The Register wrote it up in August 2017 under the headline "Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers". I ran a content blocker through all of those years and cannot name one site that served me this. That was the point of the console check.

~ the enemy died first ~

Akamai's annual report carries the ending in accounting language. In February 2020 Akamai acquired certain assets of Instart Logic, Inc. for $36.4 million in cash, with the purchase price allocated mostly to a customer-related intangible asset to be amortized over seventeen years. Customers and technology went one way. The company that had been shipping the thing stopped shipping it.

Eight months later the extension went. No browser update broke it and no store policy removed it. The thing it was pointed at stopped showing up, and its author wrote one paragraph saying so.

That is a rare way for a blocker to end. The usual ending is the platform moving underneath one, and the shelf of extensions that died that way is long. Very few of them get to close because they won.

~ 395,526 ~

Under the discontinuation notice there is one more line: "For the historical record, these were the extension stats when I unpublished it." The image below it is a single row from the Chrome Web Store developer dashboard, and it is the only user count this extension will ever have. uBlock Origin Extra, version 2.88. Type: Extension. Created May 2, 2016. Last updated Oct 20, 2020. Rating 4.45. Users 395,526.

The repository is still there, read-only since 24 October 2020, with 668 stars on it and the wiki page titled "Sites on which uBO-Extra is useful" preserved alongside the code. Nothing in it has changed in six years.

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