Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.6.1 release candidate available · 2014-05-09 15:38 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 2.6.0.3812 for Firefox is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.6.1, which we currently plan to release next Tuesday (May 13th). We fixed several issues, especially some affecting Adblock Plus on Firefox for Android:

No first-run page appears in Firefox for Android and no filter subscription is selected by default (issue 99).
Opening settings from the first-run page doesn’t work in Firefox for Android (issue 255).
Adblock Warning Removal List gets disabled on update even if the user opted in earlier (issue 424).
Home and End keys don’t work when editing a filter (issue 256).
Wrong filter rule suggested when blocking an address that contains a hash part (issue 247).
Adblock Plus icon reappears after restart if removed from the toolbar in SeaMonkey (issue 186).

To the install page

Adblock Plus for Chrome development builds are now in Chrome Web Store · 2014-05-07 18:16 by Wladimir Palant

We implemented automatic upload of the Adblock Plus for Chrome development builds to Chrome Web Store which will become the primary source of the development builds now.

Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-05-07 15:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Unfortunately, YouTube updated their website around the same time we released Adblock Plus for Safari yesterday, and partially broke blocking of videos ads in Safari (issue 438). But the good news are that we were quickly able to fix it, blocking all ads on YouTube again.

This release also fixes a regression with the “Block Element” context menu entry, which was broken in Chrome and Opera (issue 437). And we fixed an issue with the Dutch and Estonian translation which prevented installation from Chrome Web Store depending on selected language.

Adblock Plus for Safari out of beta · 2014-05-06 14:00 by Sebastian Noack

After three and a half months in beta we’re proud to finally release Adblock Plus for Safari.

The lack of a request blocking API was one of the largest challenges we faced while porting Adblock Plus to Safari. This also makes it impossible to block requests initiated by Flash. But we finally found a solution to block all ads, including pre-rolls and overlay ads, in all YouTube videos.

Adblock Plus 1.8 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-05-06 14:00 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Adblock Plus for Safari is out of beta and this is the first release where we release for Safari, Chrome and Opera simultaneously. Adblock Plus for Safari is mostly on par with Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera. There are currently some limitations however when it comes to blocking popups, XMLHttpRequests and requests initiated by Flash. Most of these are limitations in Safari that will hopefully be addressed in future Safari versions.

We also added a notification that shows up the first time users visit websites which show obtrusive anti-adblock messages, asking them whether to block those or not. This was ported from Adblock Plus for Firefox, where we introduced it in February (issue 174).

In order to hide elements we have to inject a stylesheet into the web page. However, changing an arbitrary web page always introduces the chance to break something. So we are now using Shadow DOM if available (that’s almost all supported Chrome and Opera versions). This allows us to hide our stylesheet from the web page itself (issue 309).

Chrome 35 is now in beta and has changed quite a few things in particular for extensions. So this release includes changes to restore compatibility with Chrome 35. At the same time we have dropped support for versions older than Chrome 28. Adblock Plus already suffered from some limitations on older Chrome versions, but with recent changes it is no longer possible to support Chrome 18 to 27.

This update also contains a fix for an issue with saving the data to disk which occasionally led to all filter lists and custom filters being removed (issue 361).

Other changes

Fixed: Wrong filter was sometimes created by “Block Element” dialog when matching elements by class.
Fixed various issues with the emergency notification mechanism.
The icon indicating whether Adblock Plus is enabled/disabled is correctly set on startup now.
Collapsed elements are now hidden instead of being removed from the document, in order to prevent JavaScript issues (issue 194).
Added high-resolution icons for Retina displays (issue 4).
Fixed issues with unknown frames and memory leaks while keeping track of frames (issue 178).
Fixed race condition sometimes preventing initialization on first run (issue 337).

Discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 · 2014-04-29 16:59 by Wladimir Palant

So far, Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer has been supporting every version Internet Explorer version still in use — including Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. This not only complicated development of Adblock Plus, our website and infrastructure had to support Internet Explorer 6 as well. This meant for example continuing to support the outdated SSLv3 protocol because the more secure TLS 1.0 protocol is turned off by default in Internet Explorer 6. After reviewing the current market share of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 we’ve decided that we should stop supporting them.

Eyetracking study results · 2014-04-29 13:20 by Ben Williams

We just completed a joint study with media technology firm Sticky to measure how effective different types of ads are on different types of sites, in terms of things like brand perception and brand recall. Complete findings are in this Ad Effectiveness study. Have a look at a few examples of heatmap images below (click to expand); you can see all the heatmap images as well.

Data loss on Google Chrome hopefully fixed · 2014-04-29 11:26 by Wladimir Palant

There have been complains about data loss on Google Chrome for quite some time already. People complained about all filters data suddenly being gone — without any obvious reason and without any way to reproduce the issue. It seems that we’ve finally found the cause of this issue and it has been resolved in Adblock Plus 1.7.4.1165 for Chrome. Please report any issues you notice with this development build. The current plan is to have a new stable release next Tuesday, then we will see whether the fix worked (the issue is rare enough that it isn’t possible to tell anything before rolling out the fix to the entire user base). If you are interested, the details are listed in issue 361.

To the install page

Element Hiding Helper 1.3 released · 2014-04-22 10:58 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.3

Changes

Fixed: Integration with the Inspector tool broken in current Firefox versions (issue 5).
Fixed: Filter Composer suggests empty domain name for host names with a trailing dot (forum topic).
Fixed: Element Hiding Helper menu item isn’t added in some windows (forum topic).
Fixed: Element Hiding Helper menu item doesn’t show up if Adblock Plus icon is placed in the Australis panel (issue 229).
Fixed: Shortcut key on OS X is Ctrl-Shift-K rather than Cmd-Shift-K.

Adblock Plus 2.6 for Firefox released · 2014-04-22 09:42 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6 for Firefox

The main focus of this release were performance improvements.

Changes

Made sure Adblock Plus initialization doesn’t delay Firefox startup (issue 117).
Switched to a faster way to access Adblock Plus data on disk (issue 153).
Fixed regression in Adblock Plus 2.5.1: Adblock Plus initialization takes longer for each new window opened (issue 238).
Fixed: Firefox Sync integration sometimes won’t work (issue 261).
Fixed: Filter search in Filter Preferences was broken in newer Firefox versions.
Fixed: Wrong button type displayed for Adblock Plus immediately after customizing toolbar in Firefox 29 and above (bug 981543).
Fixed: Homepage link is displayed in Filter Preference even if the subscription doesn’t define a homepage (issue 48).
Fixed: Pop-up blocker won’t work in some scenarios (issue 341).
Various code cleanup tasks (issue 137, issue 301, issue 354).