The maintainers of the Firefox add-ons directory (addons.mozilla.org) have removed all recent versions of the uBlock Origin Lite (uBOL) add-on. They cited violations found during a manual review of the add-on as the reason. They then acknowledged that the add-on was removed in error and restored it. However, the add-on's author, Raymond Hill, has refused to continue publishing it in the Firefox add-ons directory.
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The uBlock Origin Lite add-on is developed by the author of uBlock Origin and is a variant of uBlock Origin that has been converted to the declarative API (declarativeNetRequest) proposed in Chrome ManifestV3. The add-on was accused of collecting and sending user data without warning, as well as having minified or automatically generated code without providing the source code.
Raymond Hill, the author of uBlock Origin, said that he does not have time to refute Mozilla's baseless accusations. uBOL has nothing to do with data collection and does not contain minified code. All files mentioned in the report have not changed for over a year and are identical to the files that have been used in the main version of uBlock Origin for a long time.
For example, the file that Mozilla's manual review found to be collecting or sending data contains only 50 lines of code and can be easily reviewed by anyone.
Raymond later announced that he was ending support for the uBOL Firefox add-on and stopped including the Firefox version archive in releases. He cited the fact that he would no longer participate in the absurd, hostile, and time-consuming review process at addons.mozilla.org as a matter of principle.
Mozilla representatives then apologized for the error. They noted that a second review found no issues. Thus, the first decision to remove it was wrong and the add-on was restored to the catalog. In response, Raymond wrote that he was not changing his decision and removed the uBOL page from the addons.mozilla.org catalog.
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On Firefox, it’s pointless to run Lite. In my opinion! But it’s sad that there are problems sometimes with everything.