Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.1 released · 2017-07-12 14:04 by Mario König

Install Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.1

Changes

Fixed a bug that caused ABP to freeze when changing filter lists. (Issue 5223)
Implemented underline formatting to Korean. (Issue 5260)
Enlarged descriptions length to avoid clipped texts. (Issue 5243)

Adblock Plus 1.13.3 for Chrome and Opera released · 2017-07-12 11:57 by Dave Vandyke

Install Adblock Plus 1.13.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.13.3 for Opera

This release features a number of ad blocking improvements, bug fixes and some changes under the hood.

Changes

Added WebRTC connection blocking support, since those connections were being abused by some websites to serve advertising (issue 4455, 5087 and 5092).
Added support for the new advanced #?# element hiding filter syntax, which includes the new :-abp-has pseudo-class (issue 5094, 5220 and 5117).
Added a workaround to prevent websites from abusing contentWindow and contentDocument APIs to bypass ad blocking (issue 4586 and 5207).
Started allowing web requests not associated with a browser tab to be blocked (issue 5042).
Started using the webRequest API for the blocking of WebSocket connections instead of our workarounds when supported by the browser (issue 5027 and 5130).
Fixed a bug which prevented the “Hide targeted messages?” notifications from being displayed until the browser was restarted (issue 5019 and 5023).
Reduced the number of “Blocked script execution…” warnings that Adblock Plus causes (issue 4494).

Adblock Browser 1.5.3 for iOS released · 2017-07-04 11:05 by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.5.3 for iOS

Changes

Fixed a bug that caused ad blocking to stop working temporarily when visiting resource-heavy websites. (Issue 5227)
Fixed a bug that caused Adblock Browser to crash under specific circumstances. (Issue 5213)

The semi-authoritative, semi-complete history of the Adblock Plus project · 2017-06-27 18:38 by Wladimir Palant

Which one was first, Adblock or Adblock Plus? If Adblock Plus was created in 2006, how come there was Adblock Plus in 2005 already? The history of the Adblock Plus project isn’t straightforward and I already tried to explain it once. The article titled A not so short history of Adblock would have made a good blog article, except… it got published too early, before the Adblock Plus blog was created. And so it ended up on the website under “Documentation” where it was eventually removed because it wasn’t a good match. Here comes another attempt, looking back at more than ten years of project history.

New #?# syntax for advanced element hiding rules · 2017-06-19 17:21 by Hubert Figuière

Starting with Adblock Plus 1.13.3 for Chrome and Opera (and development builds as of 1.13.2.1782) there is a new and improved syntax which can be used for advanced element hiding filters. It allows for elements to be hidden based upon their contents using :-abp-has. CSS property filters have also being adjusted to be consistent with the new syntax, so both those and :-abp-has filters now use the #?# option separator.

Tags: adblock plus chrome adblock plus opera

Key elements of the new Flattr – the all-knowing, privacy-friendly algorithm · 2017-06-19 13:00 by Laura Dornheim

The new Flattr is completely automated, meaning that it flattrs your favorite content for you based on the attention you give it. This is done through our smart algorithm, but how does it really work? What does the algorithm know? What does it tell us? Let’s take a dive into automation, algorithm and privacy!

Key elements of the new Flattr - a status update · 2017-06-08 14:00 by Laura Dornheim

Soon we are officially launching a completely new, hands-off way to Flattr. So it’s about time to explain how it works and why we decided to do it this way. This is the first of a series of posts where we will also go into more detail about the internal work process around the new Flattr, as well as developer updates for some technical aspects.

Adblock Plus 2.9.1 for Firefox released · 2017-06-07 20:11 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.9.1 for Firefox

Unfortunately, the Adblock Plus 2.9 release didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped for. Most importantly, the performance degradation caused by the new data storage turned out more severe than we expected, some users were experiencing regular noticeable browser hangs. While the performance of reading and saving Adblock Plus filters hasn’t improved yet, we turned off filter hit counts by default in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 as a first consequence to make sure the data no longer needs to be saved that often (issue 5298). Users who need this functionality can turn it back on by clicking the ABP icon, going into “Options” and checking “Count filter hits.” We will be looking into other ways to improve this, even though the main issue can only be resolved by the Firefox developers.

It also wasn’t noticed before release that the new data storage doesn’t work in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, so these users ended up with filters being reset on each restart. This has also been resolved in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 (issue 5279, issue 5285), the original data should show up again now. Some users are reporting similar issues in Firefox, a problem we couldn’t reproduce so far. If you are experiencing data loss on Firefox and are willing to let me debug the issue on your computer (via TeamViewer or a similar desktop sharing tool), please let me know in the comments below.

Fixing Adblock Plus 2.9 for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey users · 2017-06-01 14:23 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 2.9 introduced very significant changes to the data storage. The unfortunate side-effect was that Adblock Plus was broken for Thunderbird users as well as users on pre-release SeaMonkey versions, and nobody noticed before the release. After we discovered a problem with our original fix, as of Adblock Plus 2.9.0.4251-beta development build things should work correctly on all platforms. This being a rather non-trivial change, your feedback is appreciated. If no other issues pop up we plan to release Adblock Plus 2.9.1 next Tuesday, June 6.

To the install page

GlobalWebIndex study: people want to block ads on mobile – but only half know they can · 2017-05-31 14:00 by Ben Williams

We wanted to know why mobile ad blocking, something that’s big in the Asia Pacific region, is not popular in other parts of the world, so we hired GlobalWebIndex to write and conduct a survey of 1,011 users about the topic. Their findings, which you can download in an analysis here, play out basically as expected: that people don’t block on mobile and didn’t know they could.