Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Browser 1.2.0 for iOS released · 2015-12-14 13:41 by Mario König

Changes

Added a crash reporter in order to be able to react faster to upcoming problems (Issue 3272)
Added swipe gestures to navigate back and forth (Issue 3111)
Added options to clear browsing data, history, cache, cookies etc. (Issue 3147)
Added the possibility to save and download images (Issue 3160)
Added an easier way to access the Dashboard and Bookmarks by tapping the url bar (Issue 3121)
Added minor graphical and usage-specific improvements (Issue 3126, Issue 3155, Issue 3240, Issue 3239)
Fixed: Fixed multiple issues around display of nonintrusive ads (Issue 3073, Issue 3110)
Fixed: Fixed various bugs to improve usability (Issue 3123, Issue 3329, Issue 3317, Issue 3044, Issue 3077, Issue 3214, Issue 3215)

Global research study of ad formats confirms what you already knew: disruptive ads don’t work · 2015-12-10 11:10 by Ben Williams

We just commissioned a survey with Ipsos, the market research firm, which asked over 5,000 users in three countries what they thought about 13 different type of ad. The results were not surprising: people don’t like ads that are big, blinking and intrusive; whereas more subtle formats are not perceived as disruptive.

Diagnostics 1.3 for Adblock Plus release candidate · 2015-12-08 10:58 by Wladimir Palant

Diagnostics extension stopped working with the recent Adblock Plus development builds due to significant architectural changes in the latter. This has been fixed in Diagnostics 1.2.5.245, it is compatible to the Adblock Plus 2.6.13.4090 development build and also to the upcoming Adblock Plus 2.7 release. It is not compatible to older Adblock Plus versions however. We plan to release Diagnostics 1.3 next Tuesday (December 15), on the same day as Adblock Plus 2.7.

Diagnostics had to be changed significantly in order to match the new architecture of Adblock Plus:

The confusing “ignore early returns” checkbox is gone – Diagnostics is no longer able to track low-level actions, so it generally cannot detect low-level calls that aren’t being forwarded to the upper level. However, there are relatively few such cases remaining in Adblock Plus now.
The columns Context, Document and Additional have been removed as well – this kind of low-level context information is no longer available to Diagnostics (and neither to Adblock Plus when it is making decisions).
On the other hand, the Request origin data has been extended. The tooltip will now show the entire frame hierarchy for a request, not only the location of the frame immediately responsible.
There is also a new column called Private. This one will indicate whether a request is associated with a private browsing window.
The Type column will no longer attempt to localize the type, instead the internal type identifier will be displayed (corresponds with filter options).

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Vastly improved support for multi-process Firefox · 2015-12-02 14:05 by Wladimir Palant

Firefox is switching to a multi-process architecture, it might be switched on by default once Firefox 45 is released. The current Adblock Plus releases mostly work in the multi-process mode but cause slowdowns and other issues. We’ve known that for a long time, but supporting the new multi-process architecture properly required massive changes to how Adblock Plus works. Today, I am happy to announce that the main part of this work is done and ready to be tested.

The current 2.6.13.4085 development build is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.7 which we plan to release on December 15, 2015. The extension core has been split up into two parts: the “parent” part which is loaded only once and the “child” part which is loaded into each Firefox process. This split affects almost all of the Adblock Plus functionality, so please report any issues you notice – both with multi-process enabled and without it.

There is a number of known issues:

Element hiding functionality isn’t working on Mac OS X when multi-process is enabled (bug 1187099). Given the lack of progress on Mozilla’s side, we will likely have to come up with a workaround, not for this release however.
Issue reporter hangs up when multi-process is enabled (issue 2809), we will address this issue in the next release.
Selection in the list of blockable items isn’t remembered reliably when multi-process is enabled (issue 3259), we will address this issue in the next release.
Diagnostics for Adblock Plus is broken (issue 3225). We should be able to address this before Adblock Plus 2.7 is released.

To the install page

Element Hiding Helper 1.3.5 released · 2015-11-25 17:51 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.3.5

This release fixes a critical issue in the latest Firefox nightly build. It also fixes the Element Hiding Helper user interface in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Mail (issue 3071).

Adblock Plus 2.6.13 for Firefox released · 2015-11-25 17:43 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.13 for Firefox

The release announcement yesterday already mentioned an upcoming change that will break Adblock Plus in Firefox nightly builds. However, at that point we didn’t know the scope of the issue and didn’t have a simple solution. Turned out, Adblock Plus isn’t merely broken itself but breaks the browser’s user interface as well. Luckily, Nils Maier provided us with a simple work-around for the issue, so we could push out a new release quickly.

Adblock Plus 1.9.4 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2015-11-24 13:05 by Dave Vandyke

Install Adblock Plus 1.9.4 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.9.4 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.9.4 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

This update contains the new $generichide and $genericblock filter options and some bug fixes.

Changes

Fixed: Anti-Adblock warning was being triggered by frames in some cases (issue 3238).
Fixed: Key-based whitelisting was ignored for element collapsing (issue 3170).
Fixed how the “Block element” feature deals with attributes containing null character (issue 3163).
Added support for new $generichide and $genericblock filter options (issue 616, issue 647).
Improved first-run page display on small screens (issue 2018).

Adblock Plus 2.6.12 for Firefox released · 2015-11-24 12:13 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.12 for Firefox

We are aware of an issue breaking Adblock Plus user interface in the latest Firefox nightly builds, this will be fixed in the next release. There is also an issue related to element hiding functionality in Firefox 43 and above, this one will also be addressed in the next release.

Changes

Added $generichide and $generic block filter options (issue 647, issue 616).
Improved first-run display on small screens, especially on mobile devices (issue 2018).
Fixed: Findbar in Filter Preferences is being triggered when trying to edit filters (issue 3129, issue 3144).
Fixed: Ctrl+F wasn’t working as expected when the findbar was already open (issue 2580).
Fixed: Filter composer’s “Advanced view” button was broken in Firefox nightly builds (issue 3263).
Fixed: Anti-Adblock warning shouldn’t show up when Adblock Plus is disabled (issue 3254).
Fixed: Anti-Adblock warning shouldn’t be triggered by frames (issue 3253).

New filter options $generichide and $genericblock · 2015-11-17 12:18 by Dave Vandyke

We have added two new filter options, $generichide and $genericblock which are already available in development builds and will be included in Adblock Plus 2.6.12 for Firefox and 1.9.4 for Chrome, Opera & Safari. They allow exception rules to be written that disable generic hiding or blocking rules for a given website whilst leaving site-specific rules intact.

This is an experimental feature that is still subject to change.

Some websites detect Adblock Plus by testing whether a certain generic rule is in effect. For example, if a file called “ads.js” isn’t loaded they might guess that the client is blocking adverts. The new options have been added to give filter authors more power to combat this, they provide a simple way to disable all generic rules for any websites that are found to be using this technique.

Here is an example rule that will disable generic hiding rules for the website adblockplus.org: @@||adblockplus.org^$generichide.

What counts as a generic rule? Currently, we define a generic rule as one that either applies to all domains, or all domains with a few exceptions. As long as a filter contains at least one domain or sitekey to match we consider it to be specific.
(Note that by this definition the blocking rule ||example.com^ is generic whereas */ads/*$domain=example.com is site-specific.)

Support for other platforms such as Internet Explorer is still in progress.

To the install page

#CampDavid NYC · 2015-11-12 12:43 by Ben Williams

Last Tuesday in New York we hosted #CampDavid NYC, a meeting of publishers, advertisers, journalists, nonprofits and tech groups to help us formulate our newly announced Acceptable Ads ‘board’. The first thing they said was, “don’t call it board.” For our part, we just did a whole lot of listening …