Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
First-run page redesigned - again · 2013-10-05 12:29 by Wladimir Palant
We are continuing to improve the Adblock Plus first-run page to make sure it provides the best possible overview. The current round of development builds (Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3725 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.5.5.998 for Chrome and Opera) contains a redesigned first-run page again, I hope you like it. If you are updating from a previous version this page won’t show up of course — you can still open it by typing the address into the location bar manually. The address is chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html in Firefox and chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome and Opera.
Note: The “Contributor Credits” link at the bottom of the first-run page isn’t hooked up yet, this page will be online soon however.
In addition, the Chrome and Opera builds now have an ad counting feature. Whenever you click the Adblock Plus icon you should get the number of ads blocked on the particular page and the total number of blocked ads (similar information is shown in the icon’s tooltip in Firefox). The total number will only consider the ads blocked after updating to this build. Please don’t comment on the design of this feature, we are working on an improved design already.
An open letter to Twitter · 2013-10-04 15:48 by Ben Williams
Dear Twitter,
We’ve been reading the early media analysis of your IPO filing, and we are not surprised that many industry pundits are speculating about how you are probably going to become more aggressive with your advertising. BuzzFeed cautioned “expect more ads”; Forbes said the IPO could “juice ad offerings”; and the Wall Street Journal admonished “don’t do what Facebook did.” We read about your deals with CBS and the NFL – which means ads galore and happy investors.
File upload crash fixed · 2013-10-04 13:25 by Wladimir Palant
There have been a number of reports about Internet Explorer crashing on file upload when Adblock Plus is installed (e.g. this one). These issues should be resolved as of Adblock Plus 1.0.541 for Internet Explorer.
We’ve got a few reports of Adblock Plus still hanging Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 even with the previous development build. So far we weren’t able to reproduce these issues however.
Weird SSL misconfigurations · 2013-10-01 13:40 by Wladimir Palant
TL;DR: Some Firefox installations don’t support strong encryption and I wonder why that is.
There is one issue with relying on community-supplied filter lists in Adblock Plus: these lists are sometimes hosted on unreliable services that will go down without any prior notice. That’s why a fallback solution had to be designed in the early stages of the projects: if a client cannot reach a filter download server several times in a row it should query a fallback URL which could reply with a new location for that filter list. These fallback requests can also be used to notice issues with filter downloads that the owners of the filter lists didn’t notice themselves.
"No Adblock Plus icon" issue in Firefox fixed for some scenarios · 2013-10-01 12:36 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3721 for Firefox should resolve a long-standing issue where some people didn’t have any Adblock Plus user interface (especially no icon) in the Firefox windows opened on startup. We could trace that issue back to delays in the Firefox startup sequence, e.g. caused by a master password prompt showing up before any Firefox windows. The result was Adblock Plus not “noticing” these windows when it initialized.
Technical details: This issue was introduced in February by our fix for bug 819561 (Pages opened by Adblock Plus during installation should open in the same PB window). There we switched to a different approach to enumerate Firefox windows. However, this enumeration approach turned out to ignore windows that were already open but didn’t become visible yet. Now we are combining both enumeration approaches to make sure that no windows are missed.
Fixed Enhanced Protected Mode support on Windows 8 · 2013-09-25 12:57 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that Enhanced Protected Mode support in the previous development build wasn’t quite working correctly, people using Windows 8 were experiencing hangs. This issue should be resolved in Adblock Plus for IE 1.0.537. Please help us test this new development build.
There is a crash when uploading email attachments that we would still like to fix before the release. Other than that no more changes are expected.