Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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

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.

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.