AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The creator of AdBlock claims to have been inspired by the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox, which is itself based on another extension called Adblock. But otherwise AdBlock is unrelated to the other efforts.
Okay this is why we have registered trademarks. You're telling me that Adblock, Adblock Plus, and AdBlock are three separate things? What the hell? I just assumed they were all the same thing until now.
I kept rereading OP's comment and looking for the difference between Adblock and AdBlock. It wasn't until your comment that I noticed the capital B in Block.
Trademarks FTW. Great example of confusion in the marketplace.
On a technicality (which is what trademark attorneys deal in), your point falls to the same fallacy. The product Adblock is an "Advertisement blocking engine" or the like. "Adblock" is a made-up word and therefore likely eligible for trademark. (Or it was before the namespace got polluted with all the variants.)
"made up word" is overly generous. It's the word "ad" followed by the word "block". "ad block" is a valid description of what it does, equivalent to "advertisement blocking". You only put the word "engine" in there to fake there being a difference. Microsoft wouldn't be able to get a trademark on "Operatingsystem".
especially in the light of how, some years ago, their lawyers swooped down like hawks on a Canadian named Mike Rowe who put up a "Mike Rowe Soft" consulting business and web site.
"AbiWord" is a single word, which may be a factor. They might have trouble if it were "Abi Word" or "Word by Abi" or even "Word". It's implausible that another entity could market a competitor of Word (or Windows) by naming it e.g. "Apple Word" or "Apple Windows". I'm going to bet that all the common permutations are trademarked by MSFT.
Also, I'm guessing Abi's limited reach is a factor. If Abi was suddenly taking a meaningful share of usage, they would probably get an angry lawyer letter.
You do not need to have a trademark registered to have trademark rights: you only need to be able to show that people associate the name with your brand.
TM are not automatic (unlike copyright at least in USA since 1978 Copyright Act) and they are fairly expensive and require vigilance (more $$$) to keep valid.
ABP also introduced an Acceptable Ads option a few years ago that triggered the creation of a fork called AdBlock Edge without that option. Adblock Edge was recently discontinued in favor of uBlock Origin [1], which has a much smaller memory footprint and is faster.
Because uBlock Origin ships with the default filter lists, so that it can work immediately out of the box without having to remotely fetch these filter lists at launch time (updated versions of these lists will be automatically fetched some time after launch).
It's not uncommon that the remote servers hosting the lists fail to respond, which would cause the extension to "malfunction" if this happened after first install -- these lists are key for the proper functioning of the extension (at least in its default out-of-the-box settings). I want the extension to work properly immediately after 1st install.
The size of uBlock Origin as downloaded from AMO or Chrome store is ~1.5 MB (because it's compressed). The compressed package would be ~650 kB without the 3rd-party lists (the content of these lists are not javascript code).
Javascript size is a weird metric, and the plot is useless without context. The plot does not even state for which browser the metric was collected (or is it the repository size? That would be completely useless, as uBlock's and uBlock origin's repositories include versions for different browsers.) Because when I add the sum of all .js files in uBlock's repository, I get 1.08MB. Heck, the whole src and platform directories combined are 2.8MB, and that includes both the Chrome and the Firefox version! Can you point to a source for that plot?
Why my comment has -4 points? I simply stated the truth, everybody can measure size of JS of these extensions. I did not count default filter list to size of JS, I only counted actual JS code and uBlock origin has simple more JS code than both Adblock and Adblock plus.
If I lied I would understand the downvotes but I didn't lie. I was also surprised that uBlock origin is bigger than adblock, especially when it's name sounds like something much much simpler and smaller but the fact is that size wise they are practically the same.
Possibly because in reality the resources consumed while at rest (disk storage) are magnitude less important than the resources consumed while running (memory/CPU cycles).
I switched Firefox from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin on several different machines, the oldest being a 2007 vintage Core 2 Duo laptop Win 7, which lets 3 gigabytes of the machine's 4 be used. I couldn't tell any subjective difference in any of the installations.
If I have to formally measure the response time difference in response in an interactive app, it's below the don't care threshold.
AdBlock is not to be confused with Adblock Plus. The creator of AdBlock claims to have been inspired by the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox, which is itself based on another extension called Adblock. But otherwise AdBlock is unrelated to the other efforts.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdBlock]
No alarm here for ABP users. (Like me).