Adblock Plus and (a little) more
New first-run page · 2013-05-29 22:50 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.2.5a.3659 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.4.1.942 for Chrome we have a new first-run page:
This is a further improvement from the first-run page we already had in Chrome, now we finally have the same page in the Firefox extension as well. In addition to a more concise explanation of acceptable ads, the idea was to provide an overview of what Adblock Plus can do and allow turning on optional features easily. We are still planning to tweak the buttons and a few minor things but other than that the design is final — the release is supposed to happen in two weeks.
The first-run page comes up only during the initial installation of the extension. In Firefox (unlike in Chrome) uninstalling and reinstalling the extension doesn’t remove the data and the first-run page doesn’t appear again. If you want to see it without resetting Adblock Plus you can copy chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html into the location bar in Firefox or chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome (the latter works only for the development builds, the address in the release build is different).
Adblock Plus 1.4.1 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-05-28 13:19 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus 1.4.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.4.1 for Opera
The news on the first Opera release based on Chromium is making the round. So we’ve released Adblock Plus 1.4.1 for both Chrome and Opera (Opera 15 and higher required). Note that the builds for Chrome and Opera are not identical, at the moment Opera isn’t fully compatible to Chrome extensions. The differences are:
- Pop-up blocking feature doesn’t work (webNavigation API isn’t available).
- Filters data is being stored in LocalStorage because FileSystem API isn’t functional.
- The ABP icon doesn’t have a right-click menu (Opera’s user interface currently differs from Chrome here).
- Argentinian Spanish locale is missing due to issues on addons.opera.com.
Other than that the Opera version is on par with Adblock Plus for Chrome. We hope that the issues in Opera will soon be resolved.
The changes in Chrome compared to the previous release are only minor at this point. In addition to some internal improvements we fixed a bug with click-and-hide not treading scheme-relative URLs correctly.
Adblock Plus 1.1.2 for Android released · 2013-05-15 13:21 by Wladimir Palant
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 temporarily disables the element hiding functionality of Adblock Plus to reduce the memory footprint. Blocking functionality isn’t affected and the overall effect should be limited — some websites will have empty spots where ads were blocked and some text ads won’t be hidden. The element hiding functionality will be enabled again once we manage to either get the size of filter lists down or make their in-memory representation more compact.
Our thoughts on the unity of German newspapers against ad blockers · 2013-05-13 13:18 by Till Faida
This morning at 10 AM, several of the best known German online news publications (Spiegel Online, Sueddeutsche.de, Faz.net, Zeit, Golem.de and RP Online) started a joint campaign urging their readers to disable their ad blocker. Large messages alerted users of Adblock Plus and other ad blockers, explaining why the publications believe ad blockers should be deactivated on the respective page and what steps the user needs to take. See for example main page warning on Spiegel Online and the respective explanation page. The following article — in German — explains our position and why we believe we are not the problem, but the solution.
Adblock Plus 2.2.4 for Firefox released · 2013-05-08 17:09 by Wladimir Palant
This release fixes an issue when running Adblock Plus in the upcoming Firefox 22 release (no colors/images in filters list and list of blockable items). It also fixes a mistaken typo correction when a domain name with a trailing dot is entered.
Update (2013-05-10): As we are signing our releases again, support for Firefox 15 and below had to be dropped due to significant bugs in the way extension signatures are verified (bug 765676 and bug 726125). If you are affected by this, please update to a Firefox version still supported by Mozilla – at the moment this means Firefox 20 (recommended) or Firefox 17 ESR. Older releases are not safe to use!
Diagnostics 1.2.4 for Adblock Plus released · 2013-05-08 15:23 by Wladimir Palant
Install Diagnostics 1.2.4 for Adblock Plus
Changes
- Updated for upcoming changes in Firefox 22.
- Fixed: Some entries don’t show up and produce an error message in console instead.
The Future of Facebook Ads (and how Adblock Plus will deal with them) · 2013-05-07 15:16 by MonztA
Advertising on Facebook started in 2006 with a simple banner ad syndication deal with Microsoft and a one-year marketing experiment by Chase credit card. Fast-forward to 2013 and Facebook now offers Facebook Ads, Sponsored Stories, Sponsored Stories within the News Feed, Promoted Posts, Sponsored Apps and Event Sponsorship. Next, it is rumored that Facebook will begin selling $1 million-dollar-per-day video ads that auto-play and cover both the left- and right-hand rails of users’ screens.
200 million Firefox downloads · 2013-04-24 16:17 by Wladimir Palant
As Adblock Plus is growing rapidly, we are constantly breaking new thresholds. Today, world’s most popular extension has achieved a new milestone that no one before us was able to reach: we have reached the 200th million download on Firefox. This makes Adblock Plus the first browser add-on ever to generate that many downloads on a single platform.
Adblock Plus 1.1.1 for Android released · 2013-04-16 11:10 by Andrey Novikov
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.
Changes
- Fixed: Adblock Plus was preventing normal operation of some applications (e.g. Samsung S-Voice)
- Fixed: Element hiding wasn’t working properly (regression in Adblock Plus 1.1)
- Fixed: Crash when filtering was stopped on some rooted devices
- Fixed issues with German translation
Adblock Plus Creative Challenge · 2013-04-08 10:08 by Wladimir Palant
As some of you might have noticed, we have launched the Adblock Plus Creative Challenge. This is a video contest, where filmmakers have to shoot an “anti-ad”.