Mozilla worked surprisingly hard to make uBO number one - for years they've actively promoted it, marked it as recommended and similar things, added weird warnings for the unwashed masses of "unrecommended" extensions, made them harder or even impossible to install on some platforms. Generally incredibly shady practices I was shocked to see from Mozilla, who I thought had above average integrity - not in the last five years or so I guess. Not even Google pulls stuff like that from what I can tell.
That said, uBO is cool and I'm happy it's still growing.
AdBlock Plus seems to whitelist your ads if you pay them millions [1][2]. The euphemism ABP (and their parent company Eyeo) uses is 'acceptable ads'. Acceptable to Eyeo I guess. It's opt-out at the users end.
OP knows all about this [3][4].
I'm not a fan of some of Mozilla's policies but I'm thankful if it's true that Ublock Origin is shown preference over the shady, user-disrespecting ABP.
I can't say much about recent years, given how I've left quite a while ago. But I do want to point out that ABP was always surprisingly upfront about Acceptable Ads (only users who cannot read could possibly miss it, it's prominent on every step of the funnel). And even though that may be hard to believe, they do take the criteria very seriously last time I checked, even doing a ton of user research, which surprisingly (to me) yielded back then that a lot of users feel bad about blocking all ads unconditionally and mostly care about not having stuff jump at them.
The only possibly shady thing you point out is that it's opt out, I get that. Especially people who want to block everything unconditionally might feel cheated because it's not called Adblock Minus.
What Mozilla did here, OTOH, I find shady because they're pretending to run an impartial addon store, when in practice some guy who wants to promote a specific extension (maybe that person feels like you, maybe he's a friend of gorhill - I have no way of knowing) can pull these kind of tricks.
But I suppose it's a case for Hanlon's Razor: They probably just don't have their stuff together about running any type of store the way the big guys do.
I'm still a proud Mozillian, I can find one thing they do shady without finding all of Mozilla shady, I realise it didn't sound like that above.
The thinking is that when something says it's an adblocker, it has one job - blocking ads. ABP doesn't do that, hiding behind the euphemism 'acceptable ads'. It would be ok if they promote it as a 'selective blocker' instead of 'adblocker'. It would also be ok if they say adblocker and the acc. ads thingy is opt-in. If Mozilla did something to highlight something that had one job to do and did it, I'm thankful.
P.S: Ublock Origin is not just an adblocker. It can block various types of content.
If there was a whitelist toggle in the funnel clearly labeled "No, I installed an adblocker to block ads, not to be shown the ads your protection racket is paid to deliver" then it would be all cool.
To be fair you should mention uBlock, fake uBlock Origin with paid allowlist by default. There is hard evidence that this unmaintained extension, which is intended only to mislead users into installing it as uBlock Origin, is owned by eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.
Mozilla worked surprisingly hard to make uBO number one - for years they've actively promoted it, marked it as recommended and similar things, added weird warnings for the unwashed masses of "unrecommended" extensions, made them harder or even impossible to install on some platforms. Generally incredibly shady practices I was shocked to see from Mozilla, who I thought had above average integrity - not in the last five years or so I guess. Not even Google pulls stuff like that from what I can tell.
That said, uBO is cool and I'm happy it's still growing.