Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-12-19 14:36 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

The previous release introduced issues with some old Chrome versions (reported for Chrome 24 and 25), element hiding wouldn’t work there. These have now been fixed. Also, the download size has been reduced again.

Adblock Plus 1.7 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-12-18 15:57 by Thomas Greiner

Install Adblock Plus 1.7 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

This release includes significant changes to the icon and the icon popup. It is the next step in redesigning the entire UI after releasing new versions of our first-run page on all platforms earlier this year.

The redesigned popup allows us to seamlessly integrate features such as the blocked ads counter and the emergency notifications. Users who want to hide the icon can now right-click on it and hide it from there which is why we removed the related option from the Options page. The icon can be brought back on the browser’s Extensions page.

Changes in detail

Icon popup has been redesigned.
Extension icon has been improved and relocated from the address bar to the browser toolbar.
The number of blocked elements on the current page can be displayed in the icon now.
Simplified selecting element to block on some websites, if the element selected cannot be blocked its parent container will be selected instead.
Selection of element to block now reacts to Enter and Esc hotkeys (select element and cancel selection respectively).
Fixed: Selecting element to block didn’t prevent links from being followed.
Fixed: Elements would sometimes be stuck with wrong background color after “Block element” menu item was used and canceled.

Links not working on a website? You can fix that! · 2013-12-04 10:42 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus users who decided to disable tracking have been complaining about severe issues on some websites for a while already. On the websites in question, clicking a link simply wouldn’t do anything unless one disables Adblock Plus. Our investigation has shown that bugs in Adobe SiteCatalyst are to blame for this issue. SiteCatalyst is a tracking solution that Adobe acquired from Omniture. A “forced link tracking” feature introduced recently is the source of these issues. Originally it was enabled for Google Chrome only, in a follow-up version for Mozilla Firefox as well.

Adblock Plus trademarks · 2013-12-03 16:20 by Till Faida

Recently we’ve encountered a growing number of people mimicking our logo and our look and feel, so we will now be taking steps to secure our trademark. Of course, users still have considerable freedom to redistribute and modify our open source software, but we need to secure our trademarks to protect you against those who would use them to commit fraud.

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.