Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Much ado about ... nothing new? Facebook's terms go into effect today · 2015-01-30 12:28 by Ben Williams

As of today, Facebook users will automatically be subject to more invasive privacy policies under the updated Terms and Conditions. This may be frightening, but their moves to individualize advertising – even outside Facebook – are really nothing new. However, it is now official. If you don’t like it, you can either quit Facebook or, along with checking a few settings, just activate Adbock Plus privacy features.

Adblock Plus 1.8.10 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2015-01-20 18:30 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.10 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.10 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.10 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Fixed: “Block element” didn’t highlight some elements correctly (issue 1751 and issue 1755).
Fixed: “Block element” didn’t work while the first run page was open (issue 1741).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Worked around an issue that broke printing of spreadsheets on Google Docs (issue 1770).
Adapted for a new API feature introduced in Chrome 41 and Opera 28, that allows to identify frames more efficiently and reliably (issue 1739).

Safari-only changes

Fixed a potential memory leak in the messaging code (issue 1724).

My, my Myspace? · 2015-01-16 17:50 by Ben Williams

On Wednesday, Venturebeat and others reported that Myspace’s owners, an ad company called Viant, will be using the personal information it has from its over 50 million users to track its users between their online activities and their purchases in the real world.

ABP for IE Installer for Active Directory · 2015-01-16 10:29 by Oleksandr Paraska

We have been contacted quite a few times by admins, willing to deploy ABP on the whole network, not just on a single machine. On Windows that is usually achieved through Active Directory and Group Policy Objects. Since our usual installer MSIs have language transforms embedded, they don’t work in that environment. This is why we are starting development builds of special installers, built without language transforms to allow for large scale deployments.

Adblock Plus 2.6.7 for Firefox released · 2015-01-14 22:03 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.7 for Firefox

Note that this release removes the “Hide placeholders of blocked elements” option from the user interface. The underlying functionality is still available via a hidden preference, as explained in the original announcement.

Changes

Removed ‘Hide placeholders of blocked elements’ option from the user interface (issue 1670).
Fixed: First-run page broken in Firefox nightlies if E10S is enabled (issue 1663, issue 1706).
Fixed first-run page layout for right-to-left languages (issue 1668).
Fixed: “Adblock Warning Removal List” is being displayed as the selected list on Firefox Mobile (issue 1712).
Fixed: “Disable on site” doesn’t always show up on Firefox Mobile (issue 1713).

Element Hiding Helper 1.3.1 released · 2015-01-13 17:40 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.3.1

Changes

Made compatible with multiprocess Firefox (issue 1091).
Fixed: Selection via mouse wheel broken (issue 227).
Fixed: Horizontal scrollbar hides element type (issue 351).
Fixed tree view in the assistant dialog (issue 447).

First-run page rearchitecturing complete · 2015-01-08 13:39 by Wladimir Palant

Ever since the Firefox nightly builds switched on E10S (multi-process) the Adblock Plus first-run page was broken. We noticed the issue mid-December last year and were working on a solution since then. The result was a completely different backend for the first-run page, one that will hopefully be used for the other pieces of the user interface as well soon (no urgency there however). The new first-run page in Adblock Plus 2.6.6.3884 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.8.9.1299 for Chrome, Opera and Safari should hopefully look and behave exactly the same as the old one. It should however be functional in the current Firefox nightlies with E10S switched on and perform better in Safari.

If you want to test the first-run page without reinstalling, you can copy chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html into the address bar in Firefox or chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome and Opera.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2015-01-06 20:00 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Worked around some circumvention attempts.
Fixed: Extension pages didn’t respect direction of right-to-left languages (issue 1668).
Fixed an issue when generating filters based on the style attribute (issue 1658).
Fixed an issue where “Block element” from the context menu didn’t work or in an inferior way than from the popup (issue 1611).
When blocking elements suggest filters based on all URLs associated with the element (issue 1601).
Removed ‘Hide placeholders of blocked elements’ option from the user interface (issue 1671).
Updated the extension description (issue 1643).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Worked around a Chrome bug that caused placeholders for blocked elements to show up on some pages (issue 1703).

Safari-only changes

Fixed: <input type=image> elements were not recognized as images (issue 1644).
Fixed: Spanish (Spain) translations were used instead of Spanish (Latin America) (issue 1666).
Fixed: Popup did not respond when multiple tabs were opened simultaneously (issue 1694).

Adblock Plus now available on Yandex Browser · 2014-12-22 20:00 by Ben Williams

We just released Adblock Plus for Yandex Browser. Now the 24 million Yandex Browser users can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that they can block all annoying ads and unleash the power of Adblock Plus’s army of additional features.

Adblock Plus 1.3 for IE released · 2014-12-15 16:43 by Oleksandr Paraska

Install Adblock Plus 1.3 for Internet Explorer

Since our last release for Internet Explorer we were very much focused on improving quality of ad blocking and hiding. Hence version 1.3 fixes a lot of issues where ABP for IE either incorrectly blocked a request, or falsely allowed the request through, when it shouldn’t have. We are quite happy with the result, and hope you’ll notice the improvement as well.

If you are interested in a bit more details, here is the list of changes that are included in Adblock Plus 1.3 for Internet Explorer

Changes

General blocking improvements (issue 1265):
- Improved detection of mime types
- Added support for XMLHttpRequests
- Added support for requests from Flash
- Improved detection of a referrer of a request.
Fix element hiding on some sites (issue 1148)
Fix incorrect blocking of video content on some sites (issue 1231)
Block video ads where they weren’t blocked before (issue 1500)
Fix “Navigation canceled” messages if IFRAME is blocked (issue 1264)
Fix version string in Add/Remove programs (issue 1222)
Changes in the First Run Page (issue 1230, issue 1356)