Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Celebrate and share a safer Internet with us today! · 2017-02-07 10:05 by Peter van Dijk
Did you know today is the official Safer Internet Day? No? Well, now you do! Today is about celebrating all the accomplishments we have achieved in the past years to make the Internet a better and safer place for everyone.
Why working at an ad blocker was the best way I could think of to help advertising · 2017-01-04 14:27 by Otilia Otlacan
Happy 2017! New year, new job – sort of, as I’ve been here at eyeo for two months already. Read on to see why I joined the company, what I found here and why I’m glad I made this move.
Adblock Plus 1.6 for Internet Explorer released · 2017-01-03 18:06 by Oleksandr Paraska
We are happy to announce the release of Adblock Plus 1.6 for Internet Explorer. This update brings a bunch of features, all of which you were able to try first in our latest development build.
As we have already pointed out in the development build announcement we are switching to CSS injection for element hiding, instead of a custom DOM traverser. This change was implemented for a more powerful element hiding.
The new way of element hiding through CSS injection will work only on IE10+. But since we support IE8+ we have also made improvements to the traverser itself and fixed other bugs, which should make the general ad blocking experience more robust.
We have also resolved a case where ABP for Internet Explorer would crash, so a more stable experience is also to be expected. You can see the full list of changes included in the release here.
Why you will always have a choice to switch off Acceptable Ads, and why you shouldn’t - an opinion piece · 2016-12-14 14:46 by Peter van Dijk
The advertising business in general has gone down the wrong rabbit hole. It’s all about getting clicks. To find out why the Acceptable Ads initiative is the most sensible choice despite all of this, read more in this personal opinion piece.
It's still perfectly legal to block ads in Germany after latest court victory over Spiegel · 2016-11-28 14:00 by Ben Williams
Late Friday we received news that we had won our sixth lawsuit in Germany. The victory, this time over Spiegel Online, confirmed once again that ad blocking is completely legal in Germany.
Flattr Plus: Let us shine some light on the progress · 2016-11-23 14:05 by Laura Dornheim
You’re probably wondering about Flattr Plus, Eyeo’s joint project with Flattr to revolutionize how people fund content. Click onward, and find all the newness that’s fit to print.
Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox released · 2016-11-22 18:17 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox
This is a maintenance release, most importantly introducing some improvements to CSS property filters.
Additional changes
- Made sure that element hiding rules don’t affect browser’s and extensions’ special pages, this regressed with Adblock Plus 2.8 (issue 4624, issue 4625).
- Fixed blockable items list slowing down page loading (issue 4587).
- Pop-ups using
data:URLs and similar unusual schemes can be blocked now (issue 4368). - When selecting keyboard shortcuts, more shortcut keys already in use by the browser can be recognized. This will change the shortcut key to show Blockable items list from Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-V to Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-U for pretty much everybody (issue 4544).
ABP meetup event in New York · 2016-11-22 15:59 by Ben Williams
We’re hosting an event in New York City in two weeks for people involved in technology, online advocacy and advertising. It will cover lots of topics, but our main intention is to recruit the best qualified people to join the Acceptable Ads Committee. Is that you? If it is, read on for more information on how to sign up.
Adblock Plus awarded for our role in improving online advertising · 2016-11-21 16:00 by Ben Williams
Some days are more satisfying than others, and today is one of those at the super satisfying end of the scale. We were awarded a prestigious award by MediaPost in recognition of our role in improving advertising, showing us that the positive impact we’ve been trying to make in online ads is getting noticed.
CSS property matching improvements · 2016-11-14 13:05 by Felix Dahlke
About a year ago, we introduced CSS property filters as a means of hiding elements based on their styles. Today, we have landed two improvements to this:
Case insensitive matching
This is a change in semantics; CSS properties will now always be matched in a case insensitive manner, to make it consistent with the way Adblock Plus matches URLs. This is unlikely to result in undesired behaviour as there shouldn’t be many use cases for case sensitive property matching.
Regular expression matching
Until now, CSS properties could only be matched using the simple URL matching syntax, which made it difficult to match property values in a fine-grained manner. To address this, properties can now optionally be matched using regular expressions. The default matching behaviour is still the same, to use regular expressions, a matching expression needs to start and end with /, for example:
example.com##[-abp-properties='/width: 3[2-8]px;/']
These improvements are available in Adblock Plus for Firefox as of 2.8.1.4229 and Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera as of 1.12.4.1682, and will presumably be released with the next stable version on each platform respectively.
Please note that we still consider CSS property filters an experimental feature, and therefore subject to change. Considering this, and the fact that CSS property filters are slower than regular element hiding rules, they should only be used as a last resort.