Adblock Plus and (a little) more
New CSS property filter syntax · 2015-12-16 17:42 by Dave Vandyke
We have created a new element hiding rule syntax which allows for the matching of elements based upon the rules applied to them from any stylesheets1. The new syntax is available now in development builds of Adblock Plus for Chrome, Opera and Safari as of 1.9.4.1500 and will be released early next year in version 1.10. Support in Adblock Plus for Firefox is under development and will follow.
This is an advanced and experimental feature that is still subject to change.
“the matching of elements based upon the rules applied to them from any stylesheets.” is quite a mouthful! What does that mean?
Well let’s say there’s a webpage https://example.com/example.html that has the following stylesheet:
.foobar {
width: 32px;
}
…and the following HTML fragment somewhere in the page:
<div class="foobar"><p>Hello world</p></div>
You could write a CSS property based element hiding rule to hide the div like this:
example.com##[-abp-properties='width: 32px;']
Wildcards are also supported, so any of these would work as well:
example.com##[-abp-properties='width: *px;']
example.com##[-abp-properties='*: 32px;']
example.com##[-abp-properties='width: 3*px;']
They can also be combined with selector matching. This rule would hide just the child paragraph tag:
example.com##[-abp-properties='width: 32px;'] > p
Syntactically they are just like normal element hiding rules, the magic is in the special -abp-properties “attribute”2. Its value is checked against any rules from all stylesheets that apply to the element. For our examples the property width: 32px; of the rule in our stylesheet does match and so the element is hidden.
That all seems pretty convoluted, why couldn’t we just write a rule that matched for the
foobarclass directly?
It’s true that in the previous example we could have matched the foobar class much more easily with a rule like this:
example.com##.foobar
The problem is that there is not always an easy way to match elements with a standard selector. Some websites have started to randomize their page structure in an attempt to circumvent ad blockers. The new CSS property filters should empower filter authors to hide adverts consisting of dynamically generated HTML and CSS as long as some of the values and/or properties of applied CSS rules are predictable.
Caution! CSS property filters are slower than normal filters and will slow down the page they are applied on. They must always be restricted to a domain and should only be used as a last resort.
1 As originally given in the stylesheet. Not to be confused with computed styles as shown by the inspector.
2 Actually for older versions of Adblock Plus that don’t yet support CSS property filters this rule really will be interpreted as matching elements with a matching -abp-properties attribute. This way filter lists can contain CSS property filters whilst still being otherwise backwards-compatible with versions of Adblock Plus that don’t support them yet.
Acceptable Ads evolves, transparency too · 2015-12-16 15:35 by Job Plas
Today, we are announcing updates to the Acceptable Ads criteria while keeping the core values. The idea is to make Acceptable Ads easier to understand, even if you don’t have a background in ads, while providing a perfect starting point for the Acceptable Ads Committee which will take over in 2016. Finally, transparency is critical for us so we are releasing more public information on how we monetize with Acceptable Ads.
Diagnostics 1.3 for Adblock Plus released · 2015-12-15 13:12 by Wladimir Palant
Install Diagnostics 1.3 for Adblock Plus
Diagnostics 1.3 has seen significant changes in order to support Adblock Plus 2.7 which we released today. Due to the extent of the changes it is no longer compatible with older Adblock Plus versions, unfortunately. We will publish Diagnostics on AMO now in order to have signed development builds but it’s still an internal helper, so use at your own risk.
Changes
- 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).
Adblock Plus 2.7 for Firefox released · 2015-12-15 12:42 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus 2.7 for Firefox
This release addresses most of the issues affecting Adblock Plus in the latest Firefox pre-release builds, particularly when multi-process mode is enabled in Firefox settings. While Adblock Plus was mostly working in multi-process mode before, it was also very slow — this is not a user experience we want our users to have when Mozilla starts rolling out multi-process mode to Firefox Beta users today. In order to support multiple processes properly we had to implement massive changes to the core functionality of Adblock Plus. These changes should have almost no visible effect other than improved performance however.
Visible changes
- If pop-ups are blocked after the redirect, the pop-up window will actually be closed and not merely prevented from loading (issue 443).
- The diagnostic page under
chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.htmlhas been removed, it was of very limited use (issue 3357).
Known issues
- Element hiding functionality isn’t working on Mac OS X when multi-process mode is enabled (bug 1187099). Given the lack of progress on Mozilla’s side, we will have to come up with some work-around later on.
- Issue reporter doesn’t create screenshots when multi-process mode is enabled (issue 3375). To be addressed in the next release.
- “Unsafe CPOW usage” warnings will still show up in Error Console sometimes when multi-process mode is enabled, most prominently when using the list of blockable items (issue 3407). To be addressed in the next release.
- Selection in the list of blockable items isn’t remembered reliably when multi-process mode is enabled (issue 3259). To be addressed in the next release.
Adblock Browser 1.2.0 for iOS released · 2015-12-14 13:41 by Mario König
Install Adblock Browser 1.2.0 for iOS
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).
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.
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.