Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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).

European Court of Justice’s IP address decision and privacy · 2016-10-21 15:26 by Rachel Brochado

There has been an interesting development in the legal nature of dynamic IP addresses based on a very recent decision of the European Court of Justice. Our data protection officer Dr. Judith Nink explains what this is all about.

New development build of Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer is available · 2016-10-19 10:17 by Oleksandr Paraska

A new development build of Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer is finally available. The most important change in this version is the change to the element hiding functionality. As of this version on IE10+ the element hiding will be done in a similar way as in our other extensions.

New element hiding approach in Firefox · 2016-10-10 15:46 by Wladimir Palant

Traditionally, element hiding on Firefox worked quite differently from all other platforms supported by Adblock Plus. Rather than decide on the filters for each website individually, all element hiding rules would be written into a single elemhide.css stylesheet file that would apply to all websites unconditionally. This approach had a few disadvantages:

The global stylesheet could not consider exceptions, such as websites where a particular rule should not apply — we had to implement a complicated mechanism to make sure that the rule didn’t have any effect in such cases, and on some websites there still were side-effects.
Changing a single element hiding rule caused the global stylesheet to apply again to all open tabs, this could cause significant delays.
With multiprocess Firefox coming up and sandboxing enabled on some platforms, we could no longer rely on being able to access that file.

Luckily, Firefox implemented better mechanisms to apply stylesheets to documents a while ago and as of Adblock Plus 2.7.3.4206-beta development build we are now taking full advantage of these. We will now make a separate decision for each website, which (if any) element hiding rules should apply. And we don’t sacrifice performance for that because the majority of element hiding rules will go into a preloaded stylesheet with all the rules which apply unconditionally.

There are a few drawbacks here:

New element hiding rules will no longer apply immediately, just like blocking rules they now require the document to be reloaded (can actually be seen as a good thing because consistent). This also affects Element Hiding Helper extension which will need to be updated.
We are no longer able to count hits for element hiding exception rules (issue 4509). We simply don’t know any more whether the rule that the exception applies to would have matched anything.
Element hiding rules apply with a slight delay which in theory might cause some ads being shown and then flashing out. In practice, I haven’t seen this yet.

This is a huge change to the inner workings of Adblock Plus and while we tested it quite thoroughly some issues are expected — let us know if you notice any.

To the install page

Adblock Browser 1.5.1 for iOS released · 2016-10-10 12:15 by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.5.1 for iOS

Changes

Updated the core of Adblock Browser to Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera/Safari 1.12.2 (Issue 4334)
Fixed a bug which caused Adblock Browser to crash under specific circumstances on iOS 10 (Issue 4435)
Fixed multiple bugs which caused occasional crashes (Issue 4436, Issue 4438, Issue 4440, Issue 4446)
Added support for reCAPTCHA (Issue 4414)