Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 1.0 for Android released · 2012-11-27 11:34 by Andrey Novikov

Install Adblock Plus for Android
If your phone doesn’t have access to Google Play you can also use the “Direct download” link on our homepage.

Until recently blocking ads on Android meant that you have to install Firefox and then Adblock Plus for Firefox. Things just got simpler for users of other browsers: all you need now is the Adblock Plus app. It works in background and filters out ads in almost all Android browsers and apps. Android 2.1 and higher is supported, the app uses the same filter lists as the Adblock Plus browser extensions.

Note that we are still in the early development stages with this application and there is certainly much room for improvement. There are also important limitations depending on the Android version on your device and whether your device has been rooted:

Rooted: Ads can be blocked on Wi-Fi and mobile connections.
Non-rooted with Android 3.1 or later: Ads will be blocked on Wi-Fi connections only.
Non-rooted with Android 3.0 or earlier: Some manual configuration is required.

Note that Android does not allow ads to be blocked on SSL encrypted websites. Also, Adblock Plus for Android will only block ads in Firefox and Opera browsers on rooted devices.

Sorry about the server outage · 2012-11-23 14:20 by Wladimir Palant

Following the Adblock Plus 2.2 release yesterday our server became pretty much unreachable. This was the result of the new typo correction feature downloading its database. Unfortunately, while I was very focused on ensuring that this feature has the necessary quality I entirely forgot what this one server request per user would mean for our old server which cannot really handle much load. A new server with much more resources is handling this now but that change still took a day to propagate. Sorry about that, again a lesson learned.

Adblock Plus 1.3.3 for Opera released · 2012-11-23 11:31 by Felix Dahlke

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.

Also note: Opera has changed the version to 1.3.4 on the add-ons site, but we’ll keep referring to this version as 1.3.3.

This release fixes issues that made ad blocking not work at all for some users. It wasn’t easy to reproduce, but having many extensions installed made it more likely to break. The problem was that Opera began to handle timeout events before loading all scripts, something we haven’t experienced with other browsers. This caused initialization errors under certain conditions.

If ad blocking still doesn’t work for you after installing this update, please report a bug.

Adblock Plus 2.2.1 released · 2012-11-23 10:56 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.2.1

Changes

Fixed issue affecting loading of filters in old Firefox version (including Firefox 10).
Fixed wrong apostrophe encoding in translations (especially Italian).

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

Install Adblock Plus 2.2

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

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.