Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Acceptable Advertising – before and after · 2014-11-04 12:58 by Ben Williams

Adblock Plus reveals insights into the whitelisting process by showing it from the inside-out: what is it like to apply? How do specific sites look before and after? We also reached out to actual sites on the whitelist to ask them what they think of Acceptable Ads.

Adblock Plus 2.6.6 for Firefox release candidate · 2014-11-03 13:17 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus 2.6.5.3872 for Firefox development build is a release candidate, we plan to release Adblock Plus 2.6.6 next Tuesday (November 11, 2014). 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 — this change was temporarily reverted but it will land again.

We don’t expect any issues with this development build. However, please let us know if Adblock Plus suddenly has trouble reading its data (everything empty in Filter Preferences). Also, there is a slight chance of startup performance regressions here.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Chrome and Opera released · 2014-10-28 18:06 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

This release only fixes an issue breaking Flash videos on Chrome 39 and Opera 26 (issue 1496). We initially addressed that issue only for Chrome 38 and Opera 25, assuming that Google fixes the Chrome bug that is causing this issue, before Chrome 39 is released. However, they didn’t yet, and it is rather unlikely that they will still fix it for Chrome 39, which is in beta now.

Note: We also released Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Safari but there are no changes there compared to Adblock Plus 1.8.6.

Time to unify - We’ve improved our icon and logo · 2014-10-22 16:10 by Sven Hartz

The development of the Adblock Plus logo and icon has over eight years of history. You can find the first Adblock Plus specific logo suggestions here, or some newer ones here. Eight years later, in year 2014, we still have very similar problems as in those days. Since it is also tradition to do this development together with our community, we are excited to do it again to improve the Adblock Plus icon and logo.

I want to separate the community discussion into an icon and a logo discussion, since early discussions have shown it to be two different topics

Adblock Plus 2.6.5 for Firefox released · 2014-10-15 21:01 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.5 for Firefox

Changes

Fixed: Element hiding exceptions are broken by changes in Firefox 34 and Firefox 35 (issue 1241, issue 1381).
Fixed: Blocking via context menu won’t always suggest blocking the most recent request (issue 362).
Fixed: Issue reporter will complain about too many filter lists even when these filter lists are “special” like the anti-adblock list (issue 690).
Fixed: Disabling filters via space bar no longer works in preferences (issue 1129).
Fixed: Sharing Adblock Plus from the first-run page won’t work if the Anti-Social list is enabled (issue 1133).
Fixed: Anti-Adblock warning will sometimes appear on websites without any anti-adblock behavior (issue 1161).
Made $sitekey option behavior more consistent, it can be used similarly to $domain now rather than whitelisting complete websites only (issue 432).

Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-10-15 00:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Removed special handling for $sitekey filter option, handling them the same as the $domain option (issue 433).
Generate protocol-agnostic filters when using the “Block element” dialog (issue 704).
Fixed an issue with escaping URLs in filters generated by the “Block element” dialog (issue 1393).
Fixed an issue causing infinite recursion when blocking <input type=image> elements (issue 1396).
Disable “Block element” option on XML pages, where it doesn’t work anyway (issue 1428).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Implemented a workaround for a bug in Chrome 38 and Opera 25, which broke some Flash videos (issue 1372).
Removed side-effects introduced by the “Block element” dialog if websites change styles of highlighted elements (issue 1325).

Cracking Facebook’s new Atlas tracking · 2014-10-01 16:07 by Ben Williams

Turning the people of social media into “people-based marketing”?

On Monday, the industry rumors came true and Facebook relaunched Atlas. Atlas is an ad platform that Facebook purchased from Microsoft last year, and it allows advertisers to track ad effectiveness across devices for users around the globe. After that they can buy ads on sites and apps outside Facebook based on Facebook’s targeting info.

Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-09-08 14:15 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Due to a mistake on our end, a few changes that were announced for the previous release didn’t actually make it into the builds. This is being corrected now.

Changes

Fixed: “Block Element” dialog was sometimes covered up by other page elements (issue 703).
Fixed: Checkbox labels on the options page should be clickable (issue 1226).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Adapted for changes in Chrome 36, Opera 23 and higher. Removed side-effects of element hiding on affected websites (e.g. Outlook 365) again (issue 1290).

Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-09-03 20:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Note: Some changes announced here didn’t actually make it into the build, these are part of Adblock Plus 1.8.5.

Changes

~~Fixed: “Block Element” dialog was sometimes covered up by other page elements (issue 703).~~

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Fixed element hiding and collapsing within inline frames on Chrome 36, Opera 23, and earlier (issue 581).
Fixed an issue where pages using an XSLT template were rendered blank (issue 673).
Made sure that bad filters cannot break extension pages (issue 926).
~~Adapted for changes in Chrome 36, Opera 23 and higher. Removed side-effects of element hiding on affected websites (e.g. Outlook 365) again (issue 1290).~~

Safari-only changes

Block in-video ads on YouTube when using the HTML5 player as well (issue 1258).
Worked around a JavaScript misoptimization bug in Safari 8 (issue 1273).
Fixed an issue which broke some websites when using EasyPrivacy (issue 649).
Improved performance when using many tabs (issue 654).

Native schmative … they're still advertisements · 2014-09-03 15:06 by Ben Williams

In the past year or so native ads have gone from ad conference fetish to John Oliver’s mainstream television program on HBO. As these “sponsored posts” and “related articles” and “stories you might be interested in” have grown in popularity, a lot of people have asked whether users of Adblock Plus are able to block them.

Yes, they can.