Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Australis theme support · 2013-12-02 12:25 by Wladimir Palant

Two weeks ago the Australis theme landed in the Firefox nightly builds. This is easily the largest Firefox user interface change since Firefox 4 and it is still being tested — it will take several months until it hits stable releases. Along with lots of visual improvements (like making toolbar customization discoverable) the toolbar customization mechanism has been overhauled, a long overdue change. The necessary changes to support the new toolbar customization now landed in the Adblock Plus development builds (starting with Adblock Plus 2.4.0.3745), these can now rely on Firefox to remember the position of our icon correctly instead of reimplementing everything. In addition to everything working correctly, there are only few changes you should expect:

The default position of our icon is the main toolbar again, not the add-on bar (the add-on bar is gone with the Australis theme, this concept proved nonviable).
The icon can be placed in the Australis “Customize and Control” panel and will show up with a large icon there as well as in the customization palette.
Australis will not remember the previous position of the icon. This means, if you uncheck “Show in toolbar” in the Adblock Plus preferences and then check it again the icon will be displayed at its default position rather than the position where you’ve previously put it. From what I can tell, this is the only piece of functionality lost, it’s a minor one however.

There is one more change in this development build: the tooltip on images in Blockable Items list will show the image again if is cached (this feature was broken for some time).

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.2 for Android released · 2013-11-29 19:02 by Felix Dahlke

Install Adblock Plus for Android

If you already have Adblock Plus for Android, it should notify you about the update shortly and download it automatically.

The major change in this release is under the hood: We’re now using libadblockplus, the same library powering ABP for Internet Explorer, instead of the custom integration of outdated ABP core code we had before.

This allowed us to implement Acceptable Ads in Android, and it’ll allow us to implement other missing features such as domain-based whitelisting in the near future. Note that element hiding is still disabled, so as with the last few versions, you might see some ads that are not acceptable. We’re working on this.

Finally, ABP for Android has been translated into 13 additional languages, including Japanese and Italian.

Adblock Plus 1.6.2 for Opera released · 2013-11-26 17:17 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.6.2 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required). Please note that it might take some time until the new version is reviewed an actually becomes available.

This release fixes an issue with size limitations for data storage in Opera, after a while filter changes would no longer be saved. With this release Adblock Plus for Opera uses the same data storage approach as Adblock Plus for Chrome. Note that this won’t work in Opera 15, a more recent Opera version is required.

There will be no corresponding Adblock Plus for Chrome release, this change is irrelevant for Chrome users.

Pure YouTube Video Experience · 2013-11-21 17:07 by MonztA

YouTube is changing, but according to its users it may not be for the better. The most recent example of this was their recent decision to force their users to use the Google Plus commenting system, making it impossible to remain anonymous. Even though hundreds of thousands are campaigning against it, it looks as if their voices will be ignored. there is little hope that it will actually change.

Adblock Plus 1.1.4 for Android released · 2013-11-14 12:31 by Felix Dahlke

Install Adblock Plus for Android

If you already have Adblock Plus for Android, it should notify you about the update shortly and download it automatically.

This release fixes an issue with streaming: Adblock Plus kept downloading content even after the client closed the connection. Big thanks to Sebastian Schmidt for contributing the patch that fixed this.

Open sourcing our infrastructure · 2013-11-08 09:00 by Felix Dahlke

About a year ago, we began to seriously scale up our infrastructure, moving from one overworked server to currently 22, with 13 of these being dedicated filter download servers.

We started with one server with a dozen different functions, and a range of scripts that kept it all together. While this works well for a single server, it’s a bit hard to scale, so we moved to a configuration management tool, Puppet, which is also used by Mozilla, Wikimedia and many others.

libablockplus and better context information in Android [Done] · 2013-11-07 09:24 by Felix Dahlke

Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-11-29.

Current state

Right now, Adblock Plus for Android has its own integration of the ABP core code that leaves some things to be desired. Also, the proxy hardly attempts to gather any context information about resources, which makes false positives more likely and keeps us from adding some features.

Goals

Make ABP for Android use libadblockplus, the same library powering ABP for Internet Explorer, and gather context information about resources to pass in.

Approach

Use libadblockplus to replace the custom integration code.
Use heuristics to deduce the frame structure for resources being loaded, this is necessary for domain-based whitelisting and Acceptable Ads, among others.
Implement Acceptable Ads, which can now work reliably.

How to get rid of the new photo preview feature on Twitter · 2013-11-06 18:26 by MonztA

As usual, it seems, it is the user who must adapt to changes and new rules. This time it’s Twitter changing the layout of its timeline, both in its web client and mobile version. The most notable change is that users are being served a pre-displayed image that expands when they click on it. On the Twitter mobile client, you can disable this feature by unchecking the “photo preview” box; but there is no way to opt out on its web client unless you use the filter we specifically created for it.

Customizable Facebook page · 2013-10-21 18:14 by Sven Hartz

You can now customize Facebook with Adblock Plus. Under default settings, ABP blocks all Facebook ads – sponsored stories, page post ads, standard ads, promoted posts or otherwise. But there are other unneeded, potentially unwanted elements that insert themselves automatically into your news feed and sidebar. Now you can block these too.

Go to facebook.adblockplus.me to choose which of these elements you’d like to block.

Adblock Plus development IRC channel is now open · 2013-10-21 17:13 by Wladimir Palant

One unfortunate side-effect of the fact that most Adblock Plus developers are Eyeo employees is many of the decisions being made away from public places. This is a suboptimal situation that we need to improve in order for our project to become more transparent again and to invite participation. We have been discussing ways to improve this and one first step is opening the IRC channel we use for development-related discussion: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#adblockplus (there is a web-based client if you prefer).

Please don’t use this channel if you need support, the right place for that is still our forum. In fact, I’ve been reluctant about opening the IRC channel because I’ve seen development-related channels being flooded by unrelated discussion to the point that they couldn’t be used for the original purpose any more. So you should really only be using this channel if you are interested in Adblock Plus development.

There will be more announcements soon, please stay tuned.