First there was uBlock. Then the maintainer got tired of it and passed it on to someone else. That next maintainer made some changes in the first couple weeks that made the original guy not happy about the direction he was taking it. So the original guy tried to take it back, but ended up forking it and calling it uBlock Origin.
That's my best recollection, I might have some details wrong. I believe Origin is the favored one right now.
The maintainer of uBlock Origin needs to do a much better job of explaining the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin. The extensions' descriptions on addons.mozilla.org are word-for-word identical:
Interesting. He still hasn't answered why a user should pick one or the other. If he wanted to focus on refactoring and larger features, he could have enlisted a "lieutenant" to manage bug fixes and releases while he works in a dev branch. The uBlock "brand" had quickly become the "new, memory-efficient ad blocker", but now the brand has been divided and muddied. This seems like a good example of the problems with 'product line extension', where a new extension should have used a new name.
I don't understand why he doesn't just re-po the repo (ha) from the guy he gave it to. it would solve the strange monetization problem and fix the schism the two projects have created for end users.
