Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Major Adblock Plus update for Chrome includes feature for mass installation on big networks · 2015-06-16 14:37 by Ben Williams

Adblock Plus today released version 1.9 for Chrome, Opera and Safari. This is the first update in around three months, and it includes improvements to performance and a new feature for IT admins that will make it significantly easier to deploy Adblock Plus across very large networks.

Read more Comment [4]

New role · 2015-06-11 11:41 by Felix Dahlke

As Wladimir has just announced, I’m taking over as Chief Technology Officer of Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus.

My first Adblock Plus patch has landed a little more than three years ago. I’ve joined Eyeo back when it was just a handful of people working on Adblock Plus for Firefox and new ports for Chrome and Android. I’ve worked on those projects, as well as on scaling and open sourcing our infrastructure, libadblockplus, a native wrapper around the Adblock Plus code, and Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer. By now I’ve contributed to pretty much all of our projects, wherever I felt my time was best spent. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on Adblock Browser for Android, our new mobile browser based on Firefox.

Read more Comment [1]

Changing roles · 2015-06-11 11:28 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve been the CTO of Eyeo since we founded it four years ago to put the Adblock Plus project on a more solid basis. This made sense, after all I created the Adblock Plus project and had been solely responsible for all things technical for five years. However, as the development team has been growing it became obvious that I’m not the best person to do this job. So, as of now I’m just a developer on the team and the new CTO is my colleague Felix Dahlke (fhd). This sounds like a bigger change than it really is, so I’ll try to answer all questions in advance.

Read more Comment [2]

Tags:

Content blocking in Safari 9 and iOS 9: good news? Or the death knell of ad blocking on Safari? · 2015-06-10 16:29 by Sebastian Noack

Apple recently announced a new mechanism for Safari and iOS extensions to block content. In short, either this new API will improve Adblock Plus performance on Safari or it will force us to rely upon an inferior blocking format that would essentially kill ad blocking on Safari.

Read more Comment [12]

Tags:

Another court, another (obvious) win for ad blocking ... and Acceptable Ads too · 2015-05-27 16:16 by Ben Williams

Ad blocking has again been found 100 percent legal, this time according to a Munich regional court which also legitimated our Acceptable Ads initiative. (Just like last time) a group of massive publishers took us to court, and just like last time the court said, “uh, no.”

Read more Comment [10]

Adblock Browser is here · 2015-05-20 11:07 by Ben Williams

Today we are pleased to announce Adblock Browser for Android. Our first foray into a more complete mobile ad blocking solution will block annoying ads out of the box and is a great overall browser for your Android device.

Read more Comment [16]

adblockplus.org is now powered by a new CMS engine · 2015-05-19 18:07 by Wladimir Palant

Five years ago we started using Anwiki to power adblockplus.org. The most important reason was our need to support translations in a way that could scale for many languages and many translators. Sadly, Anwiki has a number of issues that make working with it unnecessarily hard. We couldn’t find any existing products that do a better job so we decided to roll our own.

Read more Comment [3]

Tags:

Restating the obvious: adblocking declared legal · 2015-04-21 17:25 by Ben Williams

Today, after a four-month trial, a regional court in Hamburg ruled that adblocking is, in fact, perfectly legal. What happened is that a few German publishers took us to court over the right to block ads, but thankfully every user’s right to determine what goes when they surf online was upheld.

Read more Comment [49]

A year later, the call for better ads is deafening: the manifesto turns 1 · 2015-03-26 11:32 by Ben Williams

The Acceptable Ads Manifesto is about to celebrate its first birthday! In the past year its membership has more than tripled, and we’re looking forward to more signees who are ready to do the dirty work to get rid of bad ads.

Read more Comment [5]

Adblock Plus 1.3 for Android and an apparent change in permissions · 2015-03-12 18:34 by René Jeschke

We have encountered users wondering about an apparently new permission declared by Adblock Plus 1.3 for Android, namely: ‘full permissions to all device features and storage’. Here’s the explanation about this new permission.

Read more Comment [3]

Tags: