Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Year 2013 in retrospect · 2013-12-31 10:17 by Wladimir Palant

The year is coming to an end, this is a good time to look back at what we’ve achieved. We’ve founded Eyeo more than two years ago but getting things rolling always takes time. Before September last year we still had only two developers and could do little more than maintaining the existing code base. And it wasn’t until 2013 that the new developers got up to speed and could contribute significantly to our projects. Here is an incomplete and subjective list of what we’ve achieved this year:

• Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer is clearly the most impressive achievement. Most importantly, we didn’t simply reimplement everything we had but managed to reuse the code that is powering Adblock Plus for Firefox and Chrome. As a result, we now have an Adblock Plus library that allows embedding Adblock Plus code in environments where we cannot easily run JavaScript. As of now, this library is also used by Adblock Plus for Android which was previously using custom (and fairly complicated) code to achieve the same goal.
• With Facebook Customizer and YouTube Customizer we’ve started some nice experiments to simplify using Adblock Plus for purposes other than blocking ads. This functionality was always there but only few people knew how to use it.
• We’ve redesigned our website which was a more challenging task than one would expect. Particularly support for Internet Explorer 6 was very tricky.
• We created Adblock Plus for Opera – and scrapped it again because Opera suddenly decided to switch browser engines. And then we created another Adblock Plus for Opera because extensions for Chrome wouldn’t quite work in Opera despite it using the same browser engine.
• The redesign of the Adblock Plus user interface has started. Previously I made several fairly unsuccessful attempts to make Adblock Plus easier to use for non-technical users. This time it looks like we are on the right way. As of now, the first-run page and the icon’s pop-up (in Chrome and Opera) have been redesigned.
• The project infrastructure that was previously breaking apart (a single server handling everything) is now stable. We already moved many tasks to single-purpose servers that are configured via Puppet meaning that we can easily set up redundant servers or replace a failing server. Right now we have 22 such single-purpose servers running, most of them serving out filter lists for Adblock Plus. The configuration files behind it have been open-sourced recently.
• The acceptable ads initiative made great progress this year. We finally have the capacities to process all incoming submissions timely and managed to add lots of websites using acceptable advertising.
• We managed to win several volunteer contributors by making our developers better reachable to outside contributors. This is more than what I’ve achieved in five years of being solely responsible for Adblock Plus.

Some tasks are still in progress:

• Adblock Plus for Safari sadly wasn’t released yet, there are still a few blocking issues. At least the most important one was fixed now: Apple released fixes for Safari 6.1 and 7.0, this resolves an issue that made Adblock Plus mostly useless.
• Several important fixes for Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer are in the pipeline, in particular properly supporting Windows 8.1 was a continuous struggle. It seems that this time we nailed it and these issues will soon be no longer.
• We’ve created a simple system to manage content on our websites in multiple languages. Eyeo website will relaunch shortly based on the new system, and the goal is to replace Anwiki on adblockplus.org soon. Website translations will happen on Crowdin then, same as translations for our extensions.
• An issue tracker will be set up soon to simplify collaboration, this work is done and merely waiting for my review.
• Our Mercurial server should be migrated to RhodeCode soon which will simplify server management significantly. Also, this will allow us to have both Git and Mercurial repositories on the server. Many thanks to poz2k4444 for his help here.
• We want to make the processing of submissions for acceptable ads list more transparent soon. Currently this is only waiting for an appropriate technical solution.

I am looking forward to what we manage to do in year 2014!

Tags: adblock plus

Comment [8]

1. Mark Wege · 2014-01-03 01:20 · #

   I love the new customizers. Is there any possibility to create one for Spiegel Online. It would be cool, if it was possible to remove articles from certain authors (e.g. Jan Fleischhauer) or certain news categories like sport or panorama.

2. NyLotto · 2014-01-06 12:58 · #

   I really like the new customizers. Is there any probability to make one for Spiegel On the internet. It would be awesome, if it was possible to eliminate content from certain writers (e.g. Jan Fleischhauer) or certain information groups like game or surroundings.

3. Debashisa Jena · 2014-01-07 00:12 · #

   Adblock Plus for IE sometimes slows pageload! Why this happens? So I use tracking protection list Easylist and Easyprivacy. The add-on does exactly the same like the tracking protection list does. Why don’t you guys just let use the tpl list http://easylist-mise.adblockplus.org/easylist.tpl, it can speed up pageloading!

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   This is really not the right place to ask. Feel free to create a forum topic and mention the exact webpage there. Note that TPL lists are extremely limited and don’t provide the same functionality.

   This is an offtopic comment, as such it is removed (see message above the comment form).

4. Antwan · 2014-01-31 16:48 · #

   Since Eyeo was created, ABP became what it was obviously about to become : a big mafia, un-hiding ads in exchange of money.

   http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-zahltag-30-mio-von-amazon-ebay-google-und-yahoo/

   Wlad, you may say what you want, you’ve sold your soul many months ago, and as soon as a good ABP copycat will be acceptable enough, I’ll switch.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   You are free to believe a guy who will invent “facts” if he has no real ones. However, this blog isn’t the place to post ad hominem attacks – I am removing this comment.

5. Abobymous · 2014-01-31 19:22 · #

   Ryan Farmer · 2011-12-11 06:49 · # I’ve already responded about the acceptable ads nonsense on my blog. https://daemonfc.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/adblock-plus-and-acceptable-ads/

   In short, I smell a rat. There’s no way you weren’t paid well to do this. I think it’s kind of sneaky that it will sail over most users heads what you’ve done and they’ll just passively accept what is going on as Google profiles them (even if they don’t use Google). (Among others)

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:
   Hi Ryan, you seem to be new to this blog. I’ve always explained that Adblock Plus is a way to push back on advertisers – make them return to advertising methods that respect the users. Now it was also always painfully obvious that in its current form Adblock Plus fails to achieve this goal. A bunch of different approaches have been discussed over the years and so far this is the only one with a chance to succeed. No, we don’t get any money from Google. No, we didn’t even talk to anybody from Google when implementing this feature. Yes, we did think about Google Ads – because unblocking Google Ads is the most common request we get and most people lack the expertise to unblock them while leaving everything else blocked. No, we didn’t unblock Google Ads (they fail the strict requirements we’ve set), only Google’s search ads on one specific website. PS: Do you really need five comments to explain your thoughts?

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   You are free to believe a guy who will invent “facts” if he has no real ones. However, this blog isn’t the place to post ad hominem attacks – I am removing this comment. Feel free to leave comments here that are on topic and not insulting.

6. Anonymous · 2014-01-31 20:35 · #

   Ryan Farmer · 2011-12-11 06:49 · # I’ve already responded about the acceptable ads nonsense on my blog. https://daemonfc.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/adblock-plus-and-acceptable-ads/

   In short, I smell a rat. There’s no way you weren’t paid well to do this. I think it’s kind of sneaky that it will sail over most users heads what you’ve done and they’ll just passively accept what is going on as Google profiles them (even if they don’t use Google). (Among others)

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:
   Hi Ryan, you seem to be new to this blog. I’ve always explained that Adblock Plus is a way to push back on advertisers – make them return to advertising methods that respect the users. Now it was also always painfully obvious that in its current form Adblock Plus fails to achieve this goal. A bunch of different approaches have been discussed over the years and so far this is the only one with a chance to succeed. No, we don’t get any money from Google. No, we didn’t even talk to anybody from Google when implementing this feature. Yes, we did think about Google Ads – because unblocking Google Ads is the most common request we get and most people lack the expertise to unblock them while leaving everything else blocked. No, we didn’t unblock Google Ads (they fail the strict requirements we’ve set), only Google’s search ads on one specific website. PS: Do you really need five comments to explain your thoughts?

7. Anonymous · 2014-01-31 20:35 · #

   http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-zahltag-30-mio-von-amazon-ebay-google-und-yahoo/

8. Debashisa Jena · 2014-02-07 22:07 · #

   There are ads on CBS.com and it detects ad-blocker via some url check, cause the video ads are blocked when I use windows host file. I would love to share this on forums, but it says a ““ban is based on ip address and I don’t know why! And please consider unblocking Indian ip address from Forum! Sorry for flooding this blog!

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Please use our forum to ask for help, the blog isn’t the right place for this and off-topic comments are being removed.

Commenting is closed for this article.