Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.3.2 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-07-29 13:08 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.3.2 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

This is a bugfix release that fixes an issue with the newly introduced emergency notification mechanism.

Adblock Plus 2.3.1 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-07-24 14:00 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

Note: The originally released Adblock Plus 1.5.1 for Chrome and Opera had a bug that reset the filter settings. Adblock Plus 1.5.2 fixes that issue and restores the original data.

Changes

Improved filter list downloads.
Implemented filter forward-compatibility proposal.
Implemented an emergency notification mechanism that can be used to communicate important issues.

Notifications in Adblock Plus · 2013-07-23 16:20 by Felix Dahlke

We’re adding a new feature to Adblock Plus: Notifications.

The reason is that we sometimes need to notify users about serious issues without requiring them to update Adblock Plus. The worst-case scenario is that some users cannot receive automatic updates and we will use this feature to help the users update Adblock Plus manually. This will hopefully never happen for most users though.

We’re also planning to use it for other things, but sparingly. For example to ask a small set of users to participate in a new survey, should we ever run one again.

For now, this is only implemented in Firefox and Chrome, but we’re planning to bring it to all platforms. Firefox development build users should have it as of today, Chrome development build users should get it tomorrow. We have put up a test message for development build users, to make sure the feature works properly before we roll it out to everyone.

To the install page

Subscription downloads refactoring · 2013-07-17 15:25 by Wladimir Palant

A large batch of changes landed in Adblock Plus 2.3.0.3689 for Firefox as well as Adblock Plus 1.5.0.957 for Chrome and Opera. These implement most of the proposal to simplify subscription downloads (updating documentation still outstanding) and part of the proposal to improve forward compatibility of filters. For users, nothing should change — subscriptions should update as usually and manual subscription updates should work as they did before. There is a bunch of changes for subscription authors however:

HTTP headers that were previously considered by Adblock Plus no longer are, special comments are now the only way to tell Adblock Plus something. All special comments have the format ! Foo: bar and won’t appear in the list of filters (previously this was inconsistent).
There is a new special comment: ! Version: 1234 (must be a number). We might use it for incremental downloads later, at the moment this is only there to allow distinct versions of filter lists that can be part of the issue reporter data for example (will be implemented soon).
The special comment ! Redirect: foo no longer needs a day to take effect, Adblock Plus will rather try to download from the new location immediately. Any filters in a filter list containing this comment are ignored.
The special comment ! Expires: foo can no specify any update interval between 1 hour and 14 days. If this comment is missing or invalid, the new default value is 5 days.
When Adblock Plus downloads the filter subscription there will be additional parameters added to the URL of the request: addonName (normally “adblockplus”, “adblockpluschrome” or “adblockplusopera”), addonVersion (version of the add-on), application (e.g. “firefox” or “chrome”) and lastVersion (last version that was downloaded by this client). This allows serving different data to different clients if there are serious compatibility issues that cannot be resolved by other means.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.5 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-07-10 13:38 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.5 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

This release introduces a new first-run page that is common in all three versions.

Firefox-only changes

Removed typo correction feature
Better localization approach
Worked around a Firefox Mobile bug, selecting filter subscription is possible again
Fixed issue reporter breakage in current Firefox nightlies

Better SSL support on adblockplus.org · 2013-07-08 12:55 by Wladimir Palant

This website has been supporting SSL encryption for a while now. However, normally both HTTP and HTTPS access were allowed, with exception of some parts of the website. This was mainly because of the weak server powering that website. Now that this server is gone this could finally change: adblockplus.org is an HTTPS only website now — for better security and privacy.

Adblock Plus 2.3 release candidate available · 2013-07-03 15:42 by Wladimir Palant

It took us some more time than we expected when the previous announcement was published but we now have some release candidates: Adblock Plus 2.2.5a.3667 for Firefox as well as Adblock Plus 1.4.1.944 for Chrome and Opera. The planned release date for Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.5 for Chrome and Opera is 2013-07-09. Changes since the previous announcement:

Better buttons on the first-run page
Firefox only: typo correction feature has been removed (reasoning)
Firefox only: better localization approach (won’t be visible in this build but should hopefully improve translation quality in the final release)

Known issue: in the Filter Preferences of the Firefox build, access key of the “Backup and Restore” button doesn’t work.

To the install page

Typo correction feature removed · 2013-07-03 15:39 by Wladimir Palant

In November last year we started an experiment with the typo correction feature in Adblock Plus for Firefox. Now we removed that feature again, it’s already gone in the development builds and won’t be part of the next release. We will continue to maintain the URL Fixer extension however, anybody wanting that feature back can install it.

#pallengate: Warum Sascha Pallenberg bewusst lügt · 2013-07-01 08:36 by Till Faida

Am Mittwoch veröffentlichte Sascha Pallenberg einen vielbeachteten Artikel über Adblock Plus, mit dem er versucht uns zu schaden. Der Titel des Artikels: “Adblock Plus Undercover: Einblicke in eine mafiöses Werbenetzwerk”.

Herr Pallenberg ist Betreiber von mobilegeeks, einer Webseite, die sich ausschließlich durch die dort eingeblendete Werbung finanziert. Aktuell befinden sich allein auf der Startseite vier Werbebanner, davon drei (!) animierte Flash-Banner und 12 (!) Tracking-Solutions, die Daten über die Besucher der Seite sammeln und speichern. Vornehmlich also Werbung, die von Adblock geblockt wird, weil Internetnutzer sie als störend und aufdringlich empfinden.

Denial of service attack on adblockplus.org [Updated3] · 2013-06-28 01:10 by Wladimir Palant

The reason why our server was down for a day is a massive denial-of-service attack that started yesterday night German time. For historical reasons, our main website was running on a weak server (the weakest we have) and we already had issues with it in the past — we just didn’t have the time to migrate it to some more powerful hardware. In addition, the hosting company made matters worse by blocking our IP address without telling us in order to protect their network. They actually claimed that the IP wasn’t blocked when I asked about it explicitly. So we ended up wasting quite a bit of time unfortunately.