Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

Adblock Plus 1.2 for Internet Explorer released · 2014-08-13 12:14 by Oleksandr Paraska

Install Adblock Plus 1.2 for Internet Explorer

It has been a long while since our previous release for Internet Explorer. We have been busy tweaking and tuning and fixing different aspects of the Internet Explorer extension for this release. There were quite a few bumps along the way which caused delays. To speedup the development we’ve made a decision to drop support for IE6 and IE7. So currently IE versions 8 to 11 are supported. In case of IE6 and IE7 Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer should still run, with minor glitches though which we are not planning to fix. Luckily, after a bunch of devbuilds we are now ready for a public release.

In this release we’ve resolved a wide range of issues. While you can look up the full list of issued fixed in our issue tracker, the most important changes are:

Full support of Enhanced Protected Mode
Acceptable Ads are now supported
Improved installer. Made it multilingual. And it will now be able to detect if IE is opened and close if needed.
Fixed incorrect blocking of videos on a wide range of websites
Fixed a lot of stability issues
Fixed incorrect blocking of non-ad content
ABP should not be triggering “Only secure content is displayed” warning message anymore

It is worth mentioning that there are also a few known issues we still need to tackle, most important being “ads on Google Search sometimes aren’t hidden”. This issue can be reproduced no matter whether Acceptable Ads are enabled or disabled, so it may cause some confusion which is why we are planning to fix it ASAP (in the next few weeks).

Adblock Plus and the canvas fingerprinting threat · 2014-07-23 12:21 by Wladimir Palant

ProPublica recently wrote about canvas fingerprinting which supposedly has even more significant privacy implications than cookies. And the worst of it: unlike cookies, canvas fingerprinting cannot be blocked by Adblock Plus!

Those of you who know Adblock Plus are probably saying now: “What, Adblock Plus can block cookies? I never knew that!” And you are right of course — Adblock Plus doesn’t block cookies. So, what is this canvas fingerprinting and what does it have to do with Adblock Plus?

Adblock Plus 2.6.4 for Firefox released · 2014-07-22 17:59 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.4 for Firefox

Changes

Made sure that data is always written to disk immediately whenever filter hit counts are reset (issue 430).
Fixed: Moving filters with Ctrl-Up/Down doesn’t work in Firefox 30 and above (issue 716).
Fixed: Find functionality in the preferences doesn’t indicate that the search pattern wasn’t found (issue 455).
Fixed: User isn’t informed about anti-adblock warnings on websites producing them (issue 764).
Fixed: Blockable items aren’t refreshed on tab change in SeaMonkey (issue 290).
Fixed: “Disable on this page only” doesn’t work correctly if the address ends with # (issue 580).

About that Facebook tracking thing … · 2014-06-25 17:12 by Ben Williams

You’ve likely heard that Facebook is extending its tracking. On June 12 the company said in a blog post that it would expand its tracking to “include information from some of the websites and apps you use.” This means that if you’re looking around the web for a certain product, Facebook will be there to know that it should target ads related to that product back to you.

Sobre el bloqueo de videos en Atresmedia a usuarios de Adblock Plus [Actualización] · 2014-06-18 17:27 by Peter van Dijk

Ayer, varios de nuestros usuarios se pusieron en contacto con nosotros a través de Twitter para notificarnos que el grupo de comunicación Atresmedia había comenzado a mostrar un mensaje pidiendo a los usuarios de bloqueadores de publicidad que lo desactivaran si querían tener acceso al contenido de cualquiera de sus videos o del reproductor en directo.

Adblock Plus 2.6.3 for Firefox released · 2014-06-03 18:05 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.3 for Firefox

This is a bugfix release with the focus on stability.

Changes

Worked around a Firefox bug preventing filters from being saved in Firefox 22 and older on Windows (issue 530).
Default context menu is no longer overridden on the toolbar icon if a left click would result in the same action already (issue 449).
Fixed: Adblock Plus toolbar icon appears delayed (issue 293).
Fixed: Warning shows up in console concerning use of setUserData (only resolved for Firefox 32 and higher, issue 47).
Fixed: Bogus tooltip on the “Slow” column in Filter Preferences (issue 594).

Adblock Plus 1.8.3 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-06-03 17:45 by Thomas Greiner

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.3 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.3 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Issues like filters being removed on Chrome and settings being reset on Safari led to Adblock Plus not blocking any ads for some users. Starting with this release, the default filter lists will automatically be restored when no filter lists are configured (issue 417). Users who are affected by this will be shown a message and should check their filter list settings.

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Worked around two bugs in Chrome when using Shadow DOM (issue 450 and issue 498).
Fixed an issue with blocking ads in situations where we don’t know the top level frame (issue 451).
Enabled element hiding and collapsing inside inline frames on Chrome 37. A solution for older versions of Chrome and Opera still needs to be implemented (issue 581).

Safari-only changes

Fixed blocking of elements embedded with a relative URL (issue 573).

On the Adblock Plus memory consumption · 2014-05-15 15:35 by Wladimir Palant

The news is making the rounds that the memory consumption of Adblock Plus can be considerable in some scenarios. While some scenarios mentioned (like the page that requires almost 2 GB of memory) are really edge cases, and unlikely something you will ever see during regular browsing, the issue is certainly real. It isn’t exactly unknown either and we have been looking into ways to resolve it for a while already.