Adblock Plus and (a little) more

#CampDavid Europe · 2016-02-11 11:52 by Ben Williams

Last week we held our second #CampDavid discussion with leading experts in advertising, consumer rights, publishing and privacy. This time the stage was subterranean London, but just like last time we sought advice as we move forward with our plans to hand over the Acceptable Ads initiative to an independent committee.

Adblock Plus opens Berlin office; Ex-Wunderlist CFO Steffen Kiedel joins team · 2016-02-04 10:30 by Ben Williams

We’re pleased to announce that Adblock Plus will be opening a second office in Berlin starting this March. In addition, we’ve hired former Wunderlist CFO Steffen Kiedel to join our team. Steffen will take over as CFO and head of the Berlin office.

Bringing "blockable items" to Chrome, introducing the Adblock Plus developer tools panel · 2016-02-03 18:08 by Sebastian Noack

Since we ported Adblock Plus to Chrome, we promised our users feature-parity with Adblock Plus for Firefox. While we are still not there, the probably most significant feature that has been missing on Chrome for a long time – but not anymore – is a way to view blockable items/requests along with applied filters.

For Chrome and Opera, we decided to implement “blockable items” as a developer tools panel (issue 154). Being a tool for advanced users, filter list authors and our own developers, we think that it belongs there. And integrating it with the developer tools gives a nice user experience.

screenshot demonstrating the new Adblock Plus developer tools panel

The developer tools panel is now available in the development builds as of Adblock Plus 1.10.1.1543 for Chrome and Opera, and will be included in the next release, Adblock Plus 1.11. In order to use the developer tools panel, inspect the current page (Ctrl + Shift + I) and click on the “Adblock Plus” panel. Unfortunately, Chrome currently doesn’t provide a way to open the developer tools panel programmatically, e.g. from our icon menu.

Also as opposed to “blockable items” on Firefox, we don’t record items in advance, to avoid performance penalties and additional memory usage while not using the developer tools panel. Therefore you have to (re)load the page, with the panel open, to see all items.

The items shown in the developer tools panel include:

Web requests as seen by Adblock Plus. Blocked/Whitelisted requests are indicated red/green, with the responsible filter given in the right column. When moving the mouse over a request item, buttons – to block or whitelist the request – appear.
Element hiding filters that match and hide any element on the current page. However, since Chrome doesn’t provide a way to detect actual element hiding hits, these items are simulated by observing the document for hidden elements that match the selector of any active element hiding filter, which might not give completely accurate results in rare situations.
Document-based whitelisting including DOCUMENT, ELEMHIDE, GENERICBLOCK and GENERICHIDE exception rules, that apply for any document on the current page. Note that if a DOCUMENT exception rule applies, there won’t show any further items – as it pretty much disables Adblock Plus – for that document.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.10.1 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2016-02-03 12:16 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.10.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.10.1 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.10.1 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

This is an emergency bugfix release, fixing a regression that was introduced in the previous release and broke compatibility with Chrome 37, Opera 24, and earlier versions (issue 3580).

Besides that and some changes under the hood, this release fixes the following minor bugs:

Subscription links caused the options page to be opened twice (issue 3153).
The “Block element” option wasn’t shown in icon popup while page was loading (issue 3472).

Adblock Browser 1.1.1 for Android released · 2016-02-02 14:05 by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.1.1 for Android

Changes

Fixed: Fixed a bug that caused Adblock Browser to crash on some devices running Android 6. (Issue 3406)

Adblock Plus now available for Samsung devices · 2016-02-01 13:57 by Job Plas

Samsung, the world’s largest mobile hardware manufacturer, today introduced content blocking functionality in the default Samsung Browser for all their devices.

Decadblock: Adblock Plus turns 10 · 2016-01-22 17:34 by Ben Williams

Adblock Plus turned 10 years old this week! Celebrate the “decadblock” by reading about how Wladimir wrote the first Adblock Plus code from the original adblocker code, how Till met Wladimir and, oh yeah … how we’ve got something to celebrate after these 10 years: a half billion downloads!

Adblock Plus 2.7.1 for Firefox released · 2016-01-19 15:08 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.7.1 for Firefox

With this release Adblock Plus becomes fully compatible with the upcoming multi-process mode in Firefox, it no longer relies on backwards compatibility hacks in Firefox (issue 3259, issue 3407, issue 3449, issue 3465, issue 3486, issue 3494). This also means that the screenshot functionality in Issue Reporter is fully functional now (issue 3375), and also quite fast (issue 3504).

Additional changes

Improved performance: patterns.ini was being saved way more often than necessary (issue 3473).
$ping filter option is back and will especially apply to requests sent via navigator.sendBeacon() (issue 3452).
Requests produced by <img srcset> and <picture> will be assigned type image (issue 3459).
Requests produced by the Fetch API will be assigned type xmlhttprequest (issue 3459).
genericblock and generichide types will no longer show up in the filter assistant (issue 3478).
Removed non-standard JavaScript syntax, which caused warnings in Firefox Aurora and Nightly builds (issue 1434, issue 3418, issue 3421, issue 3502, issue 3505).
Fixed: Previously disabled and removed filter is still disabled when added back (issue 3451).

Regressions fixed

As the previous release changed Adblock Plus quite drastically, it inevitably introduced some issues. As far as we know, all of these have been resolved:

Pop-up blocking doesn’t catch redirects to a different domain (issue 3458).
Issue Reporter gets stuck if filter subscriptions need updating (issue 3461, issue 3464).
Screenshot marker in Issue Reporter is no longer red (issue 3503).
Fixed image preview in Blockable Items tooltip (issue 3491).

Known issues

Element hiding functionality isn’t working on Mac OS X when multi-process mode is enabled (bug 1187099). Mozilla is working on this.

IAB dis-invites us, disses compromise and buries dissent · 2016-01-15 15:28 by Ben Williams

Last year we sent someone to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Leadership Conference. Even if we don’t always agree, it was a constructive event. Well, we wanted to go this year too. But after buying a ticket, booking a flight and reserving a room, we got, ahem, dis-invited. It left us a bit confused: how can the IAB top brass still think ad blocking will just go away? Why are their heads so firmly entrenched in the sand?

Adblock Browser 1.2.1 for iOS released · 2016-01-14 10:34 by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.2.1 for iOS

Changes

Fixed: Fixed bug that caused crashes for users who accessed the History tab with more than 200+ entries. (Issue 3265)