uBlock Origin is a lightweight ad blocker that consumes fewer system resources than the likes of Adblock Plus. The open-source ad blocker is officially available as an extension for Chromium and Firefox, but a New Zealand-based web developer has ported the extension for Microsoft Edge.
Nik Rolls has forked the project on GitHub, and a working prototype of the extension is now available for download as a .zip file for those on the Edge Preview. Interested in taking a look? Here's how you sideload the extension on Edge:
- Download the .zip file and extract it to a folder.
- Enter about:flags in Edge's address bar, and toggle Enable extension developer features.
- From the Extensions menu, click on the Load extension button and select the folder where you extracted the .zip file.
Here's a list of issues that are yet to be fixed, per Nik:
- Downloads (settings backups, etc). Edge doesn't allow downloads from extensions yet, or I've not found the way. I'm working on it but if it's not supported then I may be blocked.
- Updating lists: unfortunately this is a big one. You currently can't download updates and are stuck with the ones in the current build, which is a very small subset of the full database. This is my top priority to fix.
- Possibly other functionality that I haven't been able to verify yet; this is very experimental!
Edge will disable sideloaded extensions every time you exit the browser, so you'll have to re-enable manually. The extension is still in a pre-release stage, so you're bound to encounter bugs. If you have any questions or suggestions for the developer, shout out in the comments.
Thanks for the extension Nik!
