Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus for Safari out of beta · 2014-05-06 14:00 by Sebastian Noack
After three and a half months in beta we’re proud to finally release Adblock Plus for Safari.
The lack of a request blocking API was one of the largest challenges we faced while porting Adblock Plus to Safari. This also makes it impossible to block requests initiated by Flash. But we finally found a solution to block all ads, including pre-rolls and overlay ads, in all YouTube videos.
Then we realized that Safari 7 changed the way extensions have to deal with pre-rendered pages. So we had to rewrite most parts of our abstraction layer to be compatible with the latest version of Safari.
In addition, we fixed various issues with our user interface, optimized it for Retina display and now support 48 languages. Ultimately, we now have a fully functional and smooth UI that indicates how many ads you’re blocking on each site you visit, tallies the amount you’ve blocked all time and gives you easy control over what you want to block.
Also, we found a way to prevent settings from being reset when browsing data are cleared, not to mention fixing every other issue users reported during the beta. One of these in particular was a pretty strange WebKit bug, which was triggered by a trivial change we made a few days ago. It made Adblock Plus block the content of every website, but we managed to work around this issue just yesterday.
Thanks to everybody who participated in the beta and helped us with their feedback.
Comment [4]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Abdullah · 2014-05-10 00:20 · #
Why we don’t have this graphic interface on firefox ?
Reply from Sebastian Noack:
We are already working on that, see issue 181.
petruc · 2014-05-21 23:17 · #
Thank you. Seeing AdBlock Plus quality being maintained as high now as it were years ago is very reassuring. Congratulations and keep on the good work!
Toine · 2014-05-26 08:16 · #
Still showed an ad on a youtube video.
Reply from Sebastian Noack:
Short after we released Adblock Plus for Safari, YouTube updated their website, breaking blocking of in-video ads. However this issue has been fixed with Adblock Plus 1.8.2. So please make sure that you are on the latest version.
Also it turned out that it is not possible to block in-video ads when watching playlists in fullscreen. If you found another case where ads on YouTube aren’t blocked, please report a bug, with the link to the video and steps to reproduce in our issue tracker.
Bastien · 2014-06-06 11:49 · #
ABP doesn’t works on the webiste www.zapiks.fr, the ads before zapiks videos still present.
Moreover, when I click on option, I’m redirected on the Safari’s top site page.
Reply from Sebastian Noack:
Unfortunately it is not possible to block ads in flash videos (except YouTube videos) on Safari as explained when we released the beta.
So when you click on “Options”, Safari’s top pages site is shown instead the Adblock Plus options page? I can’t reproduce that. Please report a bug in our issue tracker, providing the precise steps to reproduce and the version of Safari and Adblock Plus you are using.