How does this compare to something like Privacy Badger[1]? I haven't done any benchmarking, but if it causes similar slowdowns, it isn't bothersome and the benefits are definitely worth it.
If I remember correctly from the presentation (I was at W2SP where the associated talk was given) there were unspecified performance benefits over having this outsourced to the plugin architecture. I can't download the paper right now for some reason, but I'm sure it's detailed in there.
uBlock in 'Advanced User' mode[0] allows for significant, granular script and iframe blocking. 3rd-party default-deny mode, even in the absence of the EasyPrivacy list will give you a significant amount of control over external entities that are frequently used to track users across the web. It's also somewhat more intelligible than NoScript.
I would argue that with Dynamic filtering (enabled for advanced users) the goal of uBlock is not limited to ads, but to any undesired content on the internet. I guess you could say the same about Adblock, though, so I guess YMMV.
Ghostery does not report everything, only what is part of its internal database. uBlock does report everything -- and users can act on that information.
I tried Privacybadger for about 5 minutes: it was awful (significantly worse than ABP), - it's shameful that the EFF wasted donation money to finance a crap project like that, rather than support e.g. https://github.com/gorhill
Then you didn't read how PrivacyBadger works. PrivacyBadger is awesome. It doesn't work with fixed blocklists but with heuristics, and detects if you get tracked through different sites, subsequentially blocking this. It obviously doesn't work if you just visit one or a few sites with different trackers in 5 minutes.
No, I only got to this part:
Privacy Badger was born out of our desire to be able to recommend a single extension that would automatically analyze and block any tracker or ad that violated the principle of user consent; which could function well without any settings, knowledge or configuration by the user
And the part where I couldn't manually manipulate what was being blocked. Since apparently multiple pop-up adds on-click were not violating the user principle of consent...
[1] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger