Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Manifesto URL not working? Here's a temporary alternate · 2014-04-02 17:27 by Job Plas
Today, with four other organizations, we released our Acceptable Ads Manifesto. We’re doing so in order to make our stance on advertising clear and to encourage individuals and organizations to join us in this stance. The five key tenets of it are listed below.
New approach to hard drive access · 2014-03-21 19:14 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3785 we switched to a new way to access the hard drive. Ideally there shouldn’t be any visible changes, Adblock Plus simply won’t cause occasional delays in Firefox on hard drive access. It might also fix the startup delays some people are still reporting despite our previous changes. The required functionality is only available starting with Firefox 19 which is why this development build and future Adblock Plus releases will no longer install in older Firefox versions.
Technical details: Adblock Plus now uses OS.File API to make sure the hard drive is never being accessed on the main thread. Previously Adblock Plus was using rather weird hacks to achieve the same goal, that worked only for reading and writing files however — not for renaming files for example.
Switching default blocking lists for Chinese users · 2014-03-21 12:35 by Job Plas
We have stopped using ChinaList as the default filter list for Chinese and Taiwanese Adblock Plus users. Instead, we will offer a new list called EasyList China as the default choice. The new lists will be markedly better, providing our Chinese-speaking users with a great user experience.
Faster Firefox startup · 2014-03-14 22:54 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve received lots of complains over time about Adblock Plus slowing down Firefox startup considerably. It’s not that we didn’t listen but this is really a tricky problem. However, Brian Nicholson from Mozilla pointed out that there is a relatively simple solution and this solution has been implemented now. Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3778 Firefox seems to start up almost as fast with Adblock Plus as it does without. The only disadvantage should be that Adblock Plus is ready a bit later and the first page loading might still have ads.
Now to the scary part: in theory, this change might cause data corruption. So if your filters suddenly get corrupted (only some filter/filter lists load), please let us know.
Fixing data corruptions in Adblock Plus for Safari · 2014-03-13 09:50 by Sebastian Noack
When we ported Adblock Plus from Chrome to Safari, and realized that there was no fileSystem API, we moved to localStorage for storing filter lists. Short after it turned out that we can’t store more than about 1 MB in localStorage on Safari. So we moved to a WebSQL database for the filter lists, while sticking to localStorage for other persistent data.
After we released Adblock Plus for Safari Beta, users began to complain that settings were automatically reset. The reason therefore was that both localStorage and WebSQL data are cleared when Safari cleans up browsing data.
Then we became aware of Safari’s settings API. Safari doesn’t reset settings when clearing browsing data, nor do they seem to have a limit of size. So we will soon migrate to hidden settings for storing persistent data including filter lists.
Extension security 101 · 2014-02-24 17:42 by Felix Dahlke
We’ve received a couple of questions from users worried that Adblock Plus might be compromised lately. Don’t worry, it’s not. But that alone doesn’t warrant a blog post, does it? So here’s me talking about extension security a bit:
Any software you install, browser extensions are no exception, can do things against your will and without your knowledge. That’s commonly called malware or spyware. It’s a real problem, which is why there’s a filter list that blocks sites known for distributing malware.
But the most important thing is to be careful about the software you install. It’s ultimately your decision, and you should make it based on whether you trust the person or site you got it from.
Adblock Plus 2.5.1 for Firefox released · 2014-02-20 19:06 by Thomas Greiner
Install Adblock Plus 2.5.1 for Firefox
This release introduces a new notification that shows up the first time users visit a website which show obtrusive anti-adblock messages asking them whether to block those or not. Apart from this addition it also includes the following changes:
- Fixed: Pipe character in filters interpreted wrong under some circumstances
- Fixed: Share window on first-run page doesn’t appear
New blog · 2014-02-13 11:06 by Wladimir Palant
For a while, I have been occasionally misusing the Adblock Plus project blog for articles that had no relation to Adblock Plus whatsoever. I posted various articles on security, Mozilla and XULRunner there, general extension development advise, occasionally some private stuff. With the project growing and more people joining I am no longer the only person posting to the Adblock Plus blog, treating it as my private blog isn’t appropriate. So a while ago I decided to set up a separate private blog for myself and now I finally found the time to implement this. My off-topic blog posts have been migrated to the new location. Now you can read my blog if you are interested in the random stuff I post there, or you can keep reading the Adblock Plus blog if all you are interested in is Adblock Plus.
Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Chrome and Opera released · 2014-01-29 17:38 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
This release fixes pop-up blocking that was broken in the previous release. It also addresses a long standing issue, the size of the “Block element” dialog wasn’t always set correctly.
Adblock Plus for Safari Beta released · 2014-01-21 15:56 by Sebastian Noack
Install Adblock Plus for Safari
I spent the past months porting Adblock Plus to Safari. And by now, we’ve got something that is stable enough to release as a beta. Adblock Plus for Safari uses mostly the same codebase as Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera. So it has the same features and every improvement we do in the future for either browser extension will automatically land in the extension for the other browsers.