Adblock Plus and (a little) more
From the Manifesto to the Acceptable Ads Board · 2015-10-01 21:48 by Ben Williams
When we wrote the Acceptable Ads Manifesto last year, we were already thinking about how we might improve the Acceptable Ads initiative while stepping back from it as a company. Today, we’re happy to say that we’ve decided to commit to an idea we had long ago: an independent board made up of representatives for users, advertisers and publishers to assume complete control of Acceptable Ads.
Axel Springer goes home empty-handed in unsuccessful lawsuit against users’ rights · 2015-09-29 15:18 by Ben Williams
Axel Springer, the multibillion dollar publishing house that just today bought Business Insider for $343m and recently lost a high stakes bidding war to Japan’s largest media company, Nikkei, for rights to purchase the Financial Times, has sued our startup right here in our home town of Cologne, Germany. Once again, the courts ruled in favor of users’ rights, declaring that ad blocking is completely legal.
Latest Firefox update massively improves Adblock Plus memory usage · 2015-09-23 16:06 by Ben Williams
Mozilla pushed the newest update of its Firefox browser yesterday. This will improve Adblock Plus memory usage for Firefox users immensely and immediately.
Peace out ... and long live Crystal · 2015-09-20 12:31 by Ben Williams
We heard with regret that Peace pulled out of the App Store. That sucks, but the good news is that we’ll be there any time now, and in the meantime there are lots of great solutions out there like Crystal to test out.
First official ad blocker for iOS launches today; ditto for Android · 2015-09-08 11:15 by Ben Williams
While Apple gears up for iOS 9 and media speculate on some apps in private beta, we’ve gone ahead and launched. That’s right, starting right now you can download Adblock Browser from the App Store for your Apple devices and from the Google Play Store for your Android ones.
Adblock Plus for Firefox and Element Hiding Helper development builds now hosted on AMO · 2015-09-04 16:42 by Wladimir Palant
Mozilla is starting to enforce their signing on all add-ons: Firefox 40 already warns about unsigned add-ons, Firefox 41 Beta outright disables them. This isn’t a big issue for our add-on releases as these are signed by addons.mozilla.org (AMO) automatically. However, the development builds were hosted on our own servers until recently, no such signing there.
Because of that, a few weeks ago we moved our development builds to AMO to have them signed automatically. You can also download them from AMO directly (see Development Channel section in the extension description). Anybody who installed development builds from our website should be upgraded to the AMO-hosted builds automatically.
How our Adblock Browser kicks Safari's ass · 2015-09-03 17:44 by Job Plas
In order to bring the best possible ad-blocking experience to iOS, we have been working tirelessly on our mobile browser for iOS: Adblock Browser.
Let’s not f*!@ up mobile: prudence on the small screens · 2015-08-20 17:21 by Ben Williams
A New York Times piece about ad blocking had the following quote this week: “for better ads tomorrow, block ads today.” As ad spend shifts toward mobile it may actually be the newish notoriety of ad blocking, which could push online advertising away from Banner Ads 2.0 and towards something better on our mobile devices.
Ad blockers rising = innovation happening · 2015-08-11 16:39 by Ben Williams
The newest PageFair and Adobe ad blocking report entitled The cost of ad blocking came out yesterday. This is just another piece of evidence showing the permanence of ad blocking, even and especially as it moves toward mobile, and its role as a disruptive innovator.
Getting rid of the vampire-zombies · 2015-08-07 14:46 by Ben Williams
Ad blocking is changing the Internet. A recent study demonstrates another reason that people block annoying ads, and why ad blockers will have a solid spot in the evolving Internet. In other news, Adblock Browser for Android is almost out of beta, Adblock Browser for iOS will be done in about a month and we’ll be developing an app for iOS.