Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

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