Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Die "geheimen" Details von Adblock Plus · 2013-06-26 18:59 by Wladimir Palant
Note to English-speakers: Sorry about this German-language article. That’s about a German-language blog article spinning a conspiracy theory around Adblock Plus, many people apparently believed it.
Ein Blog-Artikel über Adblock Plus, auf den ich absichtlich nicht verlinken will, sorgt derzeit für Diskussionen. Wer nicht weiß, worum es geht, hat nichts verpasst: neben persönlichen Angriffen auf Leute, die an Adblock Plus beteiligt sind, werden alle möglichen (und größtenteils auch vom Projekt öffentlich kommunizierten) Fakten so zurechtgebogen, dass es irgendwie negativ klingt. Da dieser Artikel aber teilweise für investigative Recherche gehalten wird, muss ich an dieser Stelle einige Fakten richtig stellen.
Thoughts on using asm.js for performance bottlenecks in browser extensions · 2013-06-26 13:55 by Wladimir Palant
asm.js is big news right now, and for a good reason. Firefox 22 can run some JavaScript code with performance similar to that of a compiled C/C++ application — this is huge. And it got me interested: maybe asm.js can be used to improve the performance of Adblock Plus? So I spent an evening looking into asm.js and Emscripten. This post merely summarizes my thoughts for far, it isn’t meant to be an extensive overview and some of my conclusions might be wrong.
Working towards Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer · 2013-06-19 15:34 by Wladimir Palant
Remember this blog post of mine six years ago? Probably not. But you will certainly be happy to know that I was right: creating a usable ad blocker for Internet Explorer means tons of work. However, the goals of the Adblock Plus project got more ambitious since that post has been written. In order to change the web we need to provide all users with the option to run an ad blocker. This means that we could no longer ignore Internet Explorer and so a few months ago we started working on an Adblock Plus port to Internet Explorer.
Adblock Plus Creative Challenge opened up for voting · 2013-06-07 16:21 by Wladimir Palant
Two months ago we launched the first ever Adblock Plus Creative Challenge. We challenged creatives all over the world to shoot a short film somehow related to Adblock Plus and bad online advertising practices. This was also often coined as the “Anti-Advertising Ad”. It has been an incredible success and starting today, you can vote on your favorite submission.
Our thoughts on the unity of German newspapers against ad blockers · 2013-05-13 13:18 by Till Faida
This morning at 10 AM, several of the best known German online news publications (Spiegel Online, Sueddeutsche.de, Faz.net, Zeit, Golem.de and RP Online) started a joint campaign urging their readers to disable their ad blocker. Large messages alerted users of Adblock Plus and other ad blockers, explaining why the publications believe ad blockers should be deactivated on the respective page and what steps the user needs to take. See for example main page warning on Spiegel Online and the respective explanation page. The following article — in German — explains our position and why we believe we are not the problem, but the solution.
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 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 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 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.