Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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)

Removed "Hide placeholders of blocked elements" option · 2014-12-11 15:49 by Sebastian Noack

Disabling the “Hide placeholders of blocked elements” option in the menu (Firefox) or in the “General” section of the options page (Chrome, Opera, Safari) had the effect that placeholders were shown for elements which didn’t load because of Adblock Plus. The purpose of this feature was to see when something was blocked on a webpage. However, the results couldn’t be relied on because it didn’t have any effect on hidden or generally invisible elements. Also, in Chrome, Opera and Safari there is now the icon badge indicating the number of blocked requests (coming to Firefox as well soon). Therefore, we decided to remove the option from the user interface.

Adblock Plus is best defense against 'malvertising’ according to new study · 2014-12-11 15:01 by Ben Williams

After a year in which malvertising is becoming an unfortunate household name among advertisers and a favorite attack mechanism in the shady corners of Internet cybercrime, a new study concludes that “the safest way for users to protect themselves against malvertisements is to utilize solutions like Adblock Plus to prevent advertisements from being delivered to their browsers.”

Adblock Plus 1.3 for Internet Explorer Release Candidate · 2014-12-05 22:06 by Oleksandr Paraska

UPD 2014-12-12:
We have decided it would be best to release the version 1.3 on Tuesday, December 16th.

Changes

You can find all the changes for this milestone here

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)

We have been releasing devbuilds quite regularly, and feel like a lot of issues have been ironed out now. Still, if you do have any problems, please don’t hesitate to report them to us.

To devbuilds page

Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-12-02 19:32 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Added validation of custom filters, preventing users from adding filters that break element hiding (issue 491).
Fixed an issue where elements, which use a special URL and therefore aren’t blocked, are collapsed (issue 1613).
Improved and fixed some issues with the “Block element” dialog.
- Consider the style attribute as last resort, if otherwise no filter can be generated for the given element (issue 700).
- Generate element hiding filters instead of request blocking filters for elements using special URLs which can’t be blocked (issue 705).
- Use vertical scrollbars instead of wrapping long filter texts (issue 731).
- Fixed an issue where popup state wasn’t reset after closing the dialog (issue 1122).
- Fixed an error which prevented dragging the dialog to another position (issue 1516).
- Fixed insufficient escaping of CSS selectors, which broke some generated element hiding filters (issue 1527 and 1587).
- Mitigated side-effects on pages that respond to events of selected elements (issue 1603).
- Fixed: Overlays are injected for hidden elements (issue 1606).
- Fixed wrong z-index of injected overlays (issue 1607).
- Fixed an error caused by generating only a request blocking filter for an <object> element (issue 1609).
- Keep highlighting all selected elements until the dialog is closed (issue 1610).
- Fixed an issue where some elements weren’t removed immediately when the filter is saved (issue 1612).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Adapted workaround for Chrome bug causing some issues with Flash videos, for Chrome 40, Opera 27 and above (issue 1593).
Fixed: Options page isn’t opened correctly from an incognito window (issue 1268).

Safari-only changes

Fixed: Blocked frames aren’t collapsed (issue 1592).
Improved performance, by caching translations (issue 1502).

How to keep people from knowing you’ve read their Facebook message · 2014-12-02 17:23 by Ben Williams

You know how you’re able to see that someone has “seen” your message on Facebook? If you’re an Adblock Plus user and you’d like to disable this notification so that others don’t see when you’ve read their message we have a new solution that allows you to do so.

Adblock Plus 2.6.6 for Firefox released · 2014-11-11 23:59 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.6 for Firefox

There is only one change, Adblock Plus will use a slightly different approach to read files from disk (issue 1510). The reason is a change that Mozilla made for Firefox and that broke Adblock Plus completely in the Firefox nightly builds.