... and AdBlockPlus developers closed the issue. One of the reasons given: "missing features [of HTTPSB] are an issue [...] (filter groups, hit statistics etc.)". One of their devs adds "They don't support element hiding, which is one of the main causes for the high memory consumption when using Adblock Plus. Neither do they support popup blocking. [...] [T]here still might be some parts where we can learn from HTTPSB. But the main reason that it is faster and uses less memory is that HTTPSB is less powerful."

It's not easy to try to fit new code in old code, I empathize completely with that.

This is where I was at an advantage, I was writing new code to fit with new code. There are ideas though that were keys to performance breakthrough which they certainly could borrow.