Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 1.9 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2015-06-16 14:30 by Sebastian Noack
Install Adblock Plus 1.9 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.9 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.9 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)
Changes
- Fixed: Placeholders weren’t hidden for elements that were blocked by an URL given in the srcset attribute (issue 2634).
- Exception rules with protocol don’t imply the
$documentflag anymore (issue 2503). - Changed the label for the share buttons to reflect the functionality more accurately (issue 2202).
- Implemented an alternative format for subscription links (issue 2212).
- Fixed some issues with the “Block element” dialog:
- Fixed some issues with element highlighting (issue 2077, issue 2209).
- Fixed some issues with dragging the dialog (issue 2100, issue 2173, issue 2194).
- Fixed issues with how the context menu interacted with other parts of the user interface (issue 2279, issue 2298).
- The page no longer freezes when selecting an element that would result in a lot of other elements being blocked as well (issue 2215).
- Performance improvements:
- Mitigated the effect of slow request blocking filters (issue 2177).
- Determine whether a page or frame is whitelisted more efficiently by only matching exception rules (issue 2132).
- Moved code not crucial to blocking requests out of the critical path, decreasing load times (issue 2505).
Chrome/Opera-only changes
- Changed the way Adblock Plus stores persistent data such as setting and filter lists, replacing localStorage and the deprecated FileSystem API with chrome.storage (issue 2021, issue 2040).
- Run content scripts in anonymous frames again, in order to block ads more reliably (issue 2216, issue 2217).
- Worked around a Chromium bug that caused corruption of the page layout when using the feedback dialog on Google Mail and other Google websites (issue 2602).
Fixed element hiding filters using CSS selectors with commas inside quoted text (issue 2467). - Don’t assume Chromium-specific user agent string, fixing issues when using
--user-agentswitch, or running on a different platform (issue 2537). - Performance improvements:
- Flush caches after filter changes only when absolutely necessary and respect the browser’s quotas (issue 2034, issue 2297).
- Improved the performance of CSS selector injection, slightly decreasing page load time, in particular on pages with many frames and/or many active element hiding filters (issue 2528).
- Avoid calling into JavaScript when processing headers when loading other resources than documents and frames (issue 2538).
- Got rid of some
try..catchstatements which prevent functions from being optimized (issue 2658, issue 2569). - Avoid iteration over a hash-table which prevents functions from being optimized, slightly improving performance of element hiding filter matching (issue 2582).
Chrome-only changes
Opera-only changes
- Fixed: Spanish translation wasn’t being used (issue 2665).
Safari-only changes
- Restored compatibility with Safari 6 (issue 2172).
New role · 2015-06-11 11:41 by Felix Dahlke
As Wladimir has just announced, I’m taking over as Chief Technology Officer of Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.
My first Adblock Plus patch has landed a little more than three years ago. I’ve joined Eyeo back when it was just a handful of people working on Adblock Plus for Firefox and new ports for Chrome and Android. I’ve worked on those projects, as well as on scaling and open sourcing our infrastructure, libadblockplus, a native wrapper around the Adblock Plus code, and Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer. By now I’ve contributed to pretty much all of our projects, wherever I felt my time was best spent. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on Adblock Browser for Android, our new mobile browser based on Firefox.
Changing roles · 2015-06-11 11:28 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve been the CTO of Eyeo since we founded it four years ago to put the Adblock Plus project on a more solid basis. This made sense, after all I created the Adblock Plus project and had been solely responsible for all things technical for five years. However, as the development team has been growing it became obvious that I’m not the best person to do this job. So, as of now I’m just a developer on the team and the new CTO is my colleague Felix Dahlke (fhd). This sounds like a bigger change than it really is, so I’ll try to answer all questions in advance.
Content blocking in Safari 9 and iOS 9: good news? Or the death knell of ad blocking on Safari? · 2015-06-10 16:29 by Sebastian Noack
Apple recently announced a new mechanism for Safari and iOS extensions to block content. In short, either this new API will improve Adblock Plus performance on Safari or it will force us to rely upon an inferior blocking format that would essentially kill ad blocking on Safari.
Another court, another (obvious) win for ad blocking ... and Acceptable Ads too · 2015-05-27 16:16 by Ben Williams
Ad blocking has again been found 100 percent legal, this time according to a Munich regional court which also legitimated our Acceptable Ads initiative. (Just like last time) a group of massive publishers took us to court, and just like last time the court said, “uh, no.”
Adblock Browser is here · 2015-05-20 11:07 by Ben Williams
Today we are pleased to announce Adblock Browser for Android. Our first foray into a more complete mobile ad blocking solution will block annoying ads out of the box and is a great overall browser for your Android device.
Adblock Browser 1.0 for Android is in open beta · 2015-05-20 10:00 by Felix Dahlke
For the past few months, we’ve been working on a mobile browser with adblocking tightly integrated. Today we’re proud to announce the open beta of Adblock Browser for Android.
We’ve kept things secretive around Adblock Browser in the early phase, but like most of the things we do, it’s open source. We are now starting to make the repository, issues and code reviews public, and they’ll stay that way.
adblockplus.org is now powered by a new CMS engine · 2015-05-19 18:07 by Wladimir Palant
Five years ago we started using Anwiki to power adblockplus.org. The most important reason was our need to support translations in a way that could scale for many languages and many translators. Sadly, Anwiki has a number of issues that make working with it unnecessarily hard. We couldn’t find any existing products that do a better job so we decided to roll our own.
Suppressing the first run page in Firefox · 2015-05-05 11:30 by Felix Dahlke
It is now possible to suppress the first run page in Adblock Plus for Firefox as well – with the current development build 2.6.9.3935, and the upcoming 2.6.10 release.
You can do this by setting the extensions.adblockplus.preconfigured.suppress_first_run_page pref to true, for example from autoconfig.js.
Restating the obvious: adblocking declared legal · 2015-04-21 17:25 by Ben Williams
Today, after a four-month trial, a regional court in Hamburg ruled that adblocking is, in fact, perfectly legal. What happened is that a few German publishers took us to court over the right to block ads, but thankfully every user’s right to determine what goes when they surf online was upheld.