Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Forward compatibility of filters [Done] · 2013-02-04 09:31 by Wladimir Palant
Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.
Current state
A small number of our users stays on outdated Adblock Plus versions forever, e.g. 0.5% are still on Adblock Plus 0.7.* (mostly 0.7.5.5). There are similar numbers for Adblock Plus 1.3.10 which is the last version that can be installed on PowerPC Macs by regular means. Outdated versions create issues for filter list authors who don’t want to cause breakage for these users and have to use backwards-compatible filters like foo$popup,image,~image instead of just foo$popup. This is largely because Adblock Pus simply ignores unknown filter options.
Simplifying subscription downloads module [Done] · 2013-02-04 08:18 by Wladimir Palant
Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.
The module responsible for updating subscriptions is one of the most complicated components of Adblock Plus, also one that is notoriously complicated to test properly. Much of the code here is outdated for one reason or another.
Improving subscriptions download infrastructure · 2013-01-17 14:18 by Wladimir Palant
As some people probably noticed, our roadmap page hasn’t been updated in a while. I originally used it to communicate what I am working on and what my priorities currently are — but one centralized roadmap simply doesn’t work any more with multiple people on the team working on various aspects of the project in parallel. So I want to try a different approach — have roadmaps for major changes that we are working on posted to the blog. You can see all of them by looking at the corresponding blog category and there is also a separate RSS feed for them. We will try to update the roadmaps to make sure it’s obvious what has been done already.
The batch of tasks here is about the subscriptions download infrastructure, the servers that EasyList and some other filter subscriptions are downloaded from.
New adblockplus.org · 2013-01-10 16:31 by Felix Dahlke
As of now, the new adblockplus.org is finally online. These were some of our goals for the new website:
- More appealing, yet simple design
- Better navigation
- A decent mobile version
- Should work in any popular browser, including Internet Explorer 6
- Should work with JavaScript disabled
- A single landing page, not one for each platform
I believe we’ve managed all that, what do you think?
Read on if you’re interested in the technical side.