Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.2 released · 2012-11-21 17:58 by Wladimir Palant

The main change in this release is the new typo correction feature (not enabled by default). Other changes:

License change: Source code license for Adblock Plus is now GNU General Public License version 3.0 instead of Mozilla Public License version 2.0
Fixed: Firefox Sync support broken in Firefox 19.
Fixed: Text in Filter Preferences window doesn’t always adapt if the window is maximized (forum topic).
Fixed: Progress bar in issue reporter should go from right to left for right-to-left languages.
Removed use of E4X by the issue reporter (E4X is being deprecated by Mozilla).

Typo correction feature in Adblock Plus · 2012-11-21 16:40 by Wladimir Palant

Lots of Adblock Plus users were complaining about unintentionally landing on web pages that tried to use their mistake by either showing ads to them or even by installing malware. We heard you and thought up a way to fix that. A few months ago we took over the development of the URL Fixer extension and made some substantial improvements. Now this functionality is ready for prime time and has been added to Adblock Plus 2.2.

Adblock Plus 1.3.2 for Opera released · 2012-11-14 18:55 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus for Opera

Note: In order to install from our website you have to add https://adblockplus.org to the list of trusted websites in Opera. This will no longer be necessary once the update is approved on the Opera Add-ons site.

This is a minor improvement over our release yesterday. It fixes a bug in the way we dealt with raw regular expression filters and it adds back the whitelisted domains feature (not accessible via the Adblock Plus icon yet, whitelisted domains have to be added on the Options page).

Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Opera released · 2012-11-13 12:41 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus for Opera

Opera 12.10 release a few days ago introduced significant improvements to their URL Filter API. This finally allows an ad blocking extension in Opera to achieve results that are comparable to Adblock Plus for Firefox and Chrome. So we decided to take up the challenge and to release Adblock Plus for Opera.

The current release replaces the older Opera AdBlock extension (a project that will not be developed further) but it is actually based on Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Chrome. We plan to release Adblock Plus for Opera and Chrome from a common code base in future, the releases will be published simultaneously. There are currently no development builds for Opera but those should become available soon.

There are important caveats to note:

Disabling Adblock Plus on particular websites isn’t possible. This is an Opera limitation, our filters can either apply to all websites or to none of them.
“Hide placeholders of blocked elements” feature known from Firefox and Chrome isn’t available, this is also an Opera limitation.
There is currently no user interface to aid filter creation. We hope to provide something here soon.
Handling of abp: links on web pages isn’t implemented. This should be fixed in the next release.

Translating Adblock Plus: Dumping Babelzilla for Crowdin · 2012-11-09 13:40 by Wladimir Palant

The Adblock Plus project has been using Babelzilla for translations for more than six years. Yet, time has come to change that. Two days ago I moved the translations for all my extensions from Babelzilla to Crowdin, meaning Adblock Plus, Element Hiding Helper and JavaScript Deobfuscator. This was preceded by a lengthy pilot phase with the Customizations for Adblock Plus extension and recently also Adblock Plus for Chrome.

Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Google Chrome™ released · 2012-11-07 10:21 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™

Major changes

Made “Hide placeholders of blocked elements” feature work more reliably (forum topic).
Made links on the Options page open in new tab (forum topic).
A warning is displayed for people with a corrupted file storage causing the first-run page show up on each browser start (issue description).
Removed “Disable inline text ads” feature, it was almost useless and triggered a memory leak in Chrome (forum topic, forum topic).
Fixed: Ads are sometimes blocked on whitelisted pages (forum topic).
Fixed: Exception rules don’t apply to frames correctly (forum topic).
Fixed: Requests made by javascript: or data: frames aren’t blocked.
Fixed: First-run page opens twice on initial install.

Second Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Chrome release candidate · 2012-11-06 12:43 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 1.3.0.888 for Chrome development build is the new release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.3.1 release. After the previous release candidate we again improved the way placeholder hiding works. We also found and fixed two additional issues which is why the release has been delayed until tomorrow:

“Disable inline text ads” feature causes a memory leak (forum topic, forum topic) – the underlying cause seems to be a Chrome bug but this feature is mostly useless now anyway and has been removed.
Fixed: Wrong handling of frames in the exception rules (forum topic)

This development build also includes the current translations.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.3.1 for Chrome release candidate available · 2012-10-30 17:46 by Wladimir Palant

We changed a lot in Adblock Plus 1.3 for Chrome and some issues weren’t discovered before the release. A new release is planned for next Tuesday, with the changes now available for testing in Adblock Plus 1.3.0.871 for Chrome development build:

Added message on the first-run page for people affected by corrupted file storage and getting this page on each browser start (forum topic)
Fixed: Image placeholders aren’t always being hidden (forum topic)
Fixed: Chrome’s caching causes Adblock Plus to block ads on whitelisted sites (forum topic)
Fixed: Ads in data: and javascript: frames aren’t being blocked (forum topic)
Fixed: First-run page opens the first two times Adblock Plus starts up after installation (forum topic)

We’ve started a new translation round because of that warning message, feel free to contribute (even if you don’t feel like translating, you could vote on the existing translation proposals).

To the install page

Removing Do-Not-Track support from Adblock Plus · 2012-10-27 01:10 by Wladimir Palant

I still believe that the Do-Not-Track proposal is the most promising idea to let users opt out of tracking, it offers some value even to the people using Adblock Plus with the EasyPrivacy filter list. The proposal gained a lot of traction already and will continue to gain speed. Adblock Plus was one of the first implementors, and yet I decided that this feature is no longer worth keeping.

Adblock Plus 1.3 for Google Chrome™ released · 2012-10-27 00:38 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™

Major changes

Adblock Plus for Chrome is now officially out of beta, its functionality and stability are comparable to Adblock Plus for Firefox. The user interface is still lacking, we are working on that.
Some acceptable ads are now allowed by default (Adblock Plus for Firefox had this for almost a year already, easy to disable, see full explanation).
Added a first-run page (only shows up once for each user – either on new install or after update to Adblock Plus 1.3 from an older version).
Better performance now that we rely exclusively on the webRequest API (Chrome 17 and below are no longer supported).
Added support for element hiding exceptions.
Made use of new security features in new Google Chrome versions.
Worked around Chrome issue 49001 (some websites breaking due to our element hiding).
Fixed a data corruption bug that would sometimes corrupt the filters.
Removed sending of the Do-Not-Track header now that Chrome is capable of doing it itself.
Source code license is the GNU General Public License v3.0 instead of the Mozilla Public License now.