Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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”.
Adblock Plus 1.1 for Android released · 2013-03-19 16:15 by Felix Dahlke
Install Adblock Plus for Android
Even if you already have Adblock Plus for Android, please install this version manually, or you won’t get any updates in the future, because Google removed us from the Play store.
Changes
- Implemented automatic updates
- Added a dialog to help with the manual proxy configuration
- Separated filtering and proxy activation settings to avoid loss of connectivity after manual configuration
- Switched to the Holo user interface theme
- Improved icon hiding
- Implemented a workaround for a Chrome issue causing blank pages
- Fixed an issue with URLs containing apostrophes
Adblock Plus for Android removed from Google Play store · 2013-03-14 09:37 by Wladimir Palant
In a rather surprising move, Google removed Adblock Plus and other ad blocking apps from the Google Play store due to “interference with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.” This looks like a course change at Google, until recently the main distinction between Android and iPhone was that Android allowed you to install any apps as long as it isn’t malicious (meaning that it’s obvious what the app does). Google Play still allows apps stating “for rooted phones only” but I wonder whether they are next on the list to be removed – each of them performs “unauthorized actions”.
Update (2013-03-16): The Electronic Frontier Foundation did a great job explaining why this move is sadly disappointing, way better than I did.
Adblock Plus 1.4 for Google Chrome™ released · 2013-03-12 14:07 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™
Changes
- Implemented pop-up blocking functionality to get rid of pop-ups that are being allowed by the built-in pop-up blocker.
- Worked around some developer tools functionality breaking due to Chrome issue 178109 (forum topic).
- Improved hiding of placeholders, frames in a frameset are hidden as well now (forum topic).
- Made sure the important functionality is synced automatically between the Firefox and Chrome extensions.
Improvements to pop-up blocking in Chrome · 2013-03-05 15:51 by Wladimir Palant
Turns out that our previous release candidate wasn’t catching all the pop-ups. We’ve improved the approach in Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.3.4.919, that’s the new release candidate.
Pop-up blocking for Chrome · 2013-03-04 12:55 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve had pop-up blocking support in Firefox for quite a while already, starting with the 1.3.4.918 development build the same functionality is now available for Chrome. Again, this is to complement the built-in pop-up blocker for the cases where it fails, not to replace it. By now the subscription authors added filters for the most notorious unwanted pop-ups so these should be blocked immediately.
This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.4 for Google Chrome which is scheduled for release next Tuesday (2013-03-12).
Adblock Plus for Android issues with the latest Jelly Bean updates · 2013-02-15 18:32 by Felix Dahlke
As you might have noticed, Adblock Plus for Android no longer works out of the box on non-rooted devices running Android 4.1.2 or 4.2.2, it’ll show a warning asking you to manually configure the proxy instead. Since the manual configuration is non-trivial, you can follow our guide to configure the proxy.