One Developer Wages War on Google's Ad Empire: uBlock Origin Thrives Despite Chrome Crackdown - tech
(hx) 07:02 PM CEST - Apr,27 2026
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A lone open-source developer named Raymond Hill is defying Google's trillion-dollar advertising machine by single-handedly maintaining uBlock Origin, the world's most popular ad blocker with over 63,000 GitHub stars. On July 24, 2025, Google fully disabled support for Manifest V2 extensions in Chrome, effectively killing the full version of uBlock Origin on its dominant browser under the guise of "security improvements"—a move widely criticized as protecting ad revenue.
Hill refused all donation attempts and kept the project alive, releasing version 1.70.0 on March 11, 2026, which remains fully functional and auto-updating on Firefox, Edge, Brave, and Opera.
The extension is 100% open-source under GPL-3.0 and available directly from GitHub for manual installation on Chromium-based browsers, where it no longer auto-updates in Chrome.
This David-vs.-Goliath saga highlights ongoing tensions between big tech's ad-driven model and user privacy tools, with many users switching to Firefox or Brave as a result.
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Updated:11:06 PM CEST Jun,04
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