Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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

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.

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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.

Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox released · 2017-05-25 13:34 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox

This release lays important groundwork for the Web Extensions migration. The way Adblock Plus stores its data has changed drastically, though for users everything should stay exactly the same (issue 5048). The new location of your filters and subscriptions is the browser-extension-data/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}/storage.js file in your Firefox profile, the same data will be used by the Adblock Plus build based on the Web Extensions platform once it is ready.

Additional changes

The hidden data_directory and please_kill_startup_performance preferences have been removed.
It is now possible to use { and } in CSS property filters (issue 4684).

Get your Samsung Internet ad-free experience on Samsung and Google Nexus devices today · 2017-05-23 14:24 by Vicky Yu

Android users who have Samsung or Google Nexus devices can now surf without annoying ads thanks to Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet.

Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.0 released · 2017-05-23 14:17 by Mario König

Install Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.0

Changes

Added support for Nexus devices. (Issue 5192, Issue 5193)
Translated ABP for Samsung Internet Browser into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Greek, Russian, French, Italian and Dutch. (Issue 4505, Issue 5232)
Added support for whitelisting websites. (Issue 4769)
Improved user experience by introducing the new Material theme. (Issue 4513)
Fixed multiple minor issues. (Issue 4522, Issue 4602, Issue 4772, Issue 4813, Issue 5100)

Please see this blog post for more details on the newly supported devices.

New Flattr extension in closed beta · 2017-05-10 14:00 by Laura Dornheim

First users to test the revolutionary zero-click payment solution

For many months now, we’ve been internally testing the new version of Flattr. The browser extension cleverly understands which content a user really likes, and on what content he / she spends a lot of time. These sites are automatically flattred by our shiny new Flattr extension and content creators / publishers receive a share of the user’s total monthly Flattr budget.

Adblock Browser 1.5.2 for iOS released · 2017-05-02 10:47 by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.5.2 for iOS

Changes

Updated the version of Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera/Safari bundled with Adblock Browser to 1.12.4 (Issue 4554)
Introduced opt-in error reporting in order to improve stability (Issue 4672, Issue 4766)
Fixed popup issue on imgur.com (Issue 4164)
Fixed multiple issues which could potentially lead to crashes (Issue 4874, Issue 4908, Issue 4516)
Fixed multiple minor bugs (Issue 4904, Issue 5152, Issue 4703, Issue 4886, Issue 5029, Issue 5115, Issue 4480, Issue 5065)
Minor UI and usability improvements (Issue 4881, Issue 3653)

Element Hiding Helper 1.4 released · 2017-04-13 09:41 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper

With this release Element Hiding Helper becomes fully compatible with multi-process Firefox (issue 2879). We also fixed a long-standing bug: “View source” command was only showing elements but no text nodes (issue 4588).

New filter type option for WebRTC connections · 2017-04-12 12:08 by Dave Vandyke

Starting with Adblock Plus 1.13.3 for Chrome and Opera (and development builds as of 1.13.2.1761) the blocking of WebRTC connections is supported. Those connections will have the new request type of “webrtc” and so filters can be made to target them by adding the $webrtc type option.

WebRTC is an experimental browser technology which is supposed to be used for things like video conferencing. Unfortunately despite still being in active development it’s already being misused to serve adverts! Since Chrome does not yet allow WebRTC connections to be blocked by extensions directly (Chromium issue 707683), we’ve had to implement a workaround to achieve this.

Support for other platforms such as Firefox should follow soon, we’ll keep you posted.

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