Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox released · 2016-11-22 18:17 by Wladimir Palant

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.

To the install page

Fact-checking Adblock Plus allegations · 2016-11-02 13:00 by Ben Williams

As the (constantly terrifying) US election comes into the homestretch, we thought we’d take an old election-cycle media standby, the fact checker, and use it to dismantle a few of the spurious statements that get tossed around about us. Have fun! Vote Eyeo!

Adblock Plus 2.8.1 for Firefox released · 2016-10-28 14:37 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.8.1 for Firefox

Our Adblock Plus 2.8 release introduced a regression that went unnoticed for months in the development builds. Users who activated the please_kill_startup_performance preference were experiencing data loss: filters didn’t load completely. Also, importing custom filters was failing for large files. Both issues have the same root cause (issue 4576) and have been resolved in Adblock Plus 2.8.1. If your data is still incomplete after updating to Adblock Plus 2.8.1 please click the “Backup and Restore” button in Filter Preferences — one of the automatically created backups is certain to be correct.

Adblock Plus 1.12.4 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2016-10-26 14:06 by Dave Vandyke

Install Adblock Plus 1.12.4 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.12.4 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.12.4 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Stopped the “Block Element” dialog from suggesting filters based on huge URLs, since they often made Adblock Plus become unresponsive (issue 4330).
WebSocket connections are now considered to be of type $websocket instead of $other (issue 4448). For more information see Wladimir’s blog post.
Removed the features section from the first-run page (issue 4295, issue 4294).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Fixed a bug relating to how the document domain is determined, especially after redirects (issue 4386).
Added a workaround to fix $sitekey whitelisting for requests made directly after a redirection (issue 4483).
Improved WebSocket blocking capabilities (issue 4372).

Safari-only changes

Fixed YouTube ad blocking on Safari 6 (issue 4351).

Adblock Plus for Samsung Browser 1.0.4 released · 2016-10-25 16:28 by Mario König

Install Adblock Plus for Samsung Browser 1.0.4

Changes

Fixed the “Blocker of unwanted content not available” error that kept appearing as a result of the latest Samsung Browser update (Issue 4463)
Temporary cache files are now automatically cleaned, reducing app storage. (Issue 4485)

Element Hiding Helper 1.3.10 for Adblock Plus released · 2016-10-25 12:39 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.3.10 for Adblock Plus

This release makes Element Hiding Helper compatible with the just released Adblock Plus 2.8 (issue 4536). In addition, it fixes the “View source in a separate window” command which broke in recent Firefox versions (issue 4398) and fixes the Element Hiding Helper button in Inspector panel which was no longer working in the Firefox nightly builds (issue 4533).

Adblock Plus 2.8 for Firefox released · 2016-10-25 12:38 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.8 for Firefox

This release changes the way element hiding works in Firefox, so that noticeable delays from changing a single element hiding rule should be no more. Also, the behavior should be more consistent now and filters not applying on a particular website should no longer be able to cause unexpected side-effects. On the downside, changes to element hiding rules will only apply after a page is reloaded now (which is actually consistent with blocking rules).

Additional changes

There is a special $websocket type option now to block WebSocket requests, the type was previously considered to be other here (announcement).
Our toolbar icon will look better on high-resolution screens (issue 4142).
Removed feature selection from the first-run page until the features can be removed similarly easily (issue 4294).
Hits for CSS property filters which were introduced in the previous release are being counted now (issue 3969).
Fixed: CSS property filters applied even when Adblock Plus was disabled everywhere (issue 4201).
Fixed: A regression in pop-up blocking functionality caused websites to be mistakenly considered pop-ups under some circumstances (issue 4335).
Corrected handling of frames with srcdoc attribute.
Fixed and improved search functionality in Filter Preferences, was partially broken in Firefox nightly builds (issue 4510).