If the author is here, please turn off the counter by default. We're blocking distracting things in our browser, we don't need another pointless distracting thing in our browser toolbar.
Counter opinion: I like the number because if there's a website working not quite right, I can easily see the number and disable uBlock to test out if that's the cause.
But you can't, though. uBlock shows the total number of blocked items since you started Firefox. Not the number for a given page or site. Making it a basically superfluous mostly useless datapoint.
On Safari and Chrome, it displays the number of filters applied on the current site. This is (super) useful. If on Firefox you're getting a global count then that's a bug (so please report it on Github).
Perhaps changing the color from red to something more "off" (grey?) would help distract less.
Useful why? It's blocking stuff, that's great. I don't care how many things it blocks on a specific page. It make no difference to me while browsing. The little counter changing just looks like an annoying animated GIF in the corner of my browser.
I get that a subset of users would derive some pleasure at knowing how many things are blocked on every single website they visit or users who'd like to use it to troubleshoot a specific page that doesn't load when blocking is enabled (in which case having a quick right-click toggle to turn it on so users can use it to troubleshoot would be ideal), but I'd wager that most users do not. Users that want it on can turn it on. (cue subset of users responding that they either 1. enjoy seeing the count or 2. use it to troubleshoot the rare page that doesn't load as a result of blocking)
This is super useful feature for debugging. Happens sometimes that something goes wrong and an ad is regenerated after being blocked. So the ad blocker would block it again, thus generating an infinite loop that can take up all the memory (if the ad blocker saves any information about the blocked ads on the current page in memory) and crash your machine in less than a minute in the worst case. In the best case it would just lock up your browser window and you wouldn't know why. Knowing the number of ads blocked would quickly help debug such situations.
