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What uBlock can and can not (currently) do
No. uBlock started off by extracting the pattern-filtering engines (net and cosmetic filters) from HTTP Switchboard ("HTTPSB"). These engines needed more work to bring them to maturity. Most of that work won't be ported back to HTTPSB. See "The road ahead" for details.
"The memory usage isn't actually ABP's fault, EasyList is like 40,000+ lines of rules that all have to be parsed by ABP".
uBlock also parse EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Malware domains lists, and Peter Lowes's Ad server list out of the box and yet uses less than half the memory of Adblock Plus ("ABP"), which is itself much more efficient than AdBlock (at least this is what I have measured on Chromium-based browsers).
uBlock is its own thing, it doesn't try to be Adblock Plus or any other.
The $document filter option is not supported, see issue #405. At time of writing, I see 10 such filters in EasyList.
Read carefully: Not supporting $document filter option has absolutely nothing to do with uBlock being more efficient than ABP. It's a principle thing: the purpose of the $document filter option is to disable a blocker on a specific site. I do not want uBlock to submit itself to 3rd-party filter lists for when it should completely disable it self.
No. uBlock currently offers you more:
- Extends the filter syntax.
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Dynamic filtering, the ability to point-and-click to filter on/off
scriptandiframetags, on a 1st- or 3rd-party basis. I consider this to be a key feature of uBlock. - Element picker is more modern.
- Let you select most common filter lists out of the box, without the need to import them first.
- Supports hosts files (hostnames are translated into the equivalent of
||www.example.com^). - Ability to whitelist single web page, or a whole section of a web site.
- Ability to not load cosmetic filters (saves lot of memory).
- A log of the net requests showing allowed/blocked net requests, and which filter, if any, matched each net request.
No it doesn't. Last time I checked, uBlock has a larger memory footprint than both Ghostery and Disconnect. That's for their own memory footprint. I didn't look into their contributions to the memory footprint added to each web page.
Regarding CPU footprint, I don't know, I didn't measure yet (maybe I will), but my hunch at this point is that the CPU overhead is higher than that of uBlock. I did run CPU benchmark a very long time ago, and this was the case -- but after such a long time, I have to assume things have changed and I would need to benchmark again -- a time-consuming task.
Keep in mind that uBlock, like ABP, Adguard, and some others allows users to enter their own filters, something not possible with Ghostery or Disconnect.
There are also other differences, or similarities: uBlock, Disconnect and ABP are licensed under GPL. Also, there is this.