Dropbox innovated online storage, sure (my ISP already provided telent & SSH access in 90s and I could mount my homedir with SSHFS and WebDAV but sure, relatively small ISP in small country who didn't popularize it just like tons of other efforts did not). Dropbox caught the momentum. Who's to applaud for that?

Plus, first of all in order for the masses to use it securely it needs some kind of encryption for its storage. Other than that it was just a good UI for tools already in existence. WebDAV, SSHFS, rsync, or Coda (which you can see mentioned and ignored multiple times throughout the thread). For the encrypted content part, one could use GPG, but many other solutions exist as well. Now, if I was the NSA back in 2006, I'd invest in Dropbox via a proxy. Gives me free data to plow through which people otherwise store locally. And its data they want to save. Hah, I'll save it too! I knew about those risks before, so I wasn't raving about "the cloud" back in the days. Heck, I'm still skeptical.

What a lot of innovation has in common is that it succeeded to market itself. No, that's not something I have a lot of respect for indeed because I don't have a whole lot with things like marketing, sales, and popularity. Sue me. I'd like to look at the technical side of things and peek at the less popular gems (though on say Kickstarter I'm wary as well).

Parallel to that, it is often some kind of GUI which gets popular while it uses techniques from more abstract developments: libraries, smaller software research projects which got bought, CLI.

Which important features did ABP innovate? Seeing what it added to original adblock is lackluster. And even that original adblock isn't the first browser-based adblocker.

We're also talking about a time where the browser was the way to read the WWW and there wasn't a way to embed the browser in "an app" (an app? what?). Well, thinking a bit more about it, it was there (MSHTML for example). But it wasn't high quality. And you could block those ads via /etc/hosts

> Yes, but uBlock probably wouldn't exist if ABP had not established the market and highlighted the need for ad blocking extensions.

You mistakenly neglect to take into account that if ABP didn't exist, adblock wouldn't have been continued (ie. forked) by someone else. Parallel to that, if Linux didn't exist, the BSD lawsuit would've set that source code free, and it would've caught on from there. Its easy to say, in hindsight, "well that worked out well" but its equally easy to say "well if that didn't work out alternatively something else could've worked out". Without an in depth analysis on why that was so unique (we are talking about inventions then and patents more likely I am not going to buy your argument, sorry.