Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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

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.

Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-10-16 17:13 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

Common changes

Some missing translations for the first-run page are now included.
Fixed: Data corruption warning was showing up for the initial installation.

Opera-only changes

Pop-up blocking has been enabled, current Opera versions now have the necessary functionality.
Fixed: First-run page sometimes didn’t show up (worked around a bug that Opera apparently ported from Presto to Chromium).

Adblock Plus 2.4 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.6 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-10-09 16:52 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.4 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.6 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.6 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

This release improves the first-run page that is common in all three browsers. We redesigned it once again and made sure that new users get a better overview.

Firefox-only changes

Fixed: Adblock Plus icon wasn’t showing up on browser startup for some users.
Fixed: Redirect blocking wasn’t working in current Firefox versions.
Fixed: Issue reporter fails to process some console errors.
Fixed: Adblock Plus fails to start up when updating in current Firefox nightly builds (workaround for bug 924340).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

The number of ads blocked on a page and in total now shows up when in the icon is clicked.

Note: This is the last Adblock Plus for Chrome release where we use Argentinian Spanish when the locale selected in Chrome is “Latin American Spanish.” Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t allow supporting the many existing Latin American Spanish dialects properly. However, we’ve determined that Mexican Spanish will be a better choice for the Latin American region and future releases will use that locale.

Adblock Plus 1.1 for Internet Explorer released · 2013-10-08 18:04 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.1 for Internet Explorer

As with the previous release, this version is compatible to anything down to Internet Explorer 6. However, this version now also supports Enhanced Protected Mode (the default in Internet Explorer 11 under Windows 8.1) and is properly tested in Windows 8.1. Altogether, the improvements in this version:

Enhanced Protected Mode support.
Better user interface for update notifications.
Fixed a crash when files are being uploaded.
Fixed a hang sometimes happening in Internet Explorer 6.

There are still a few known limitations in this version. Also, some users are reporting Adblock Plus causing Internet Explorer hangs on Windows 8.1, so far we were unable to reproduce this issue despite identical configuration.

Acceptable Ads by the numbers · 2013-10-07 15:53 by Ben Williams

Our first-ever release of statistics on the Acceptable Ads initiative.

777 whitelist applicants, over 50 percent rejected because ads not acceptable.
In all, we accepted only 9.5 percent of applicants.
148 whitelist proposals, over 90 percent for free.