Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-05-07 15:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.1 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Unfortunately, YouTube updated their website around the same time we released Adblock Plus for Safari yesterday, and partially broke blocking of videos ads in Safari (issue 438). But the good news are that we were quickly able to fix it, blocking all ads on YouTube again.

This release also fixes a regression with the “Block Element” context menu entry, which was broken in Chrome and Opera (issue 437). And we fixed an issue with the Dutch and Estonian translation which prevented installation from Chrome Web Store depending on selected language.

Adblock Plus 1.8 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-05-06 14:00 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Adblock Plus for Safari is out of beta and this is the first release where we release for Safari, Chrome and Opera simultaneously. Adblock Plus for Safari is mostly on par with Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera. There are currently some limitations however when it comes to blocking popups, XMLHttpRequests and requests initiated by Flash. Most of these are limitations in Safari that will hopefully be addressed in future Safari versions.

We also added a notification that shows up the first time users visit websites which show obtrusive anti-adblock messages, asking them whether to block those or not. This was ported from Adblock Plus for Firefox, where we introduced it in February (issue 174).

In order to hide elements we have to inject a stylesheet into the web page. However, changing an arbitrary web page always introduces the chance to break something. So we are now using Shadow DOM if available (that’s almost all supported Chrome and Opera versions). This allows us to hide our stylesheet from the web page itself (issue 309).

Chrome 35 is now in beta and has changed quite a few things in particular for extensions. So this release includes changes to restore compatibility with Chrome 35. At the same time we have dropped support for versions older than Chrome 28. Adblock Plus already suffered from some limitations on older Chrome versions, but with recent changes it is no longer possible to support Chrome 18 to 27.

This update also contains a fix for an issue with saving the data to disk which occasionally led to all filter lists and custom filters being removed (issue 361).

Other changes

Fixed: Wrong filter was sometimes created by “Block Element” dialog when matching elements by class.
Fixed various issues with the emergency notification mechanism.
The icon indicating whether Adblock Plus is enabled/disabled is correctly set on startup now.
Collapsed elements are now hidden instead of being removed from the document, in order to prevent JavaScript issues (issue 194).
Added high-resolution icons for Retina displays (issue 4).
Fixed issues with unknown frames and memory leaks while keeping track of frames (issue 178).
Fixed race condition sometimes preventing initialization on first run (issue 337).

Data loss on Google Chrome hopefully fixed · 2014-04-29 11:26 by Wladimir Palant

There have been complains about data loss on Google Chrome for quite some time already. People complained about all filters data suddenly being gone — without any obvious reason and without any way to reproduce the issue. It seems that we’ve finally found the cause of this issue and it has been resolved in Adblock Plus 1.7.4.1165 for Chrome. Please report any issues you notice with this development build. The current plan is to have a new stable release next Tuesday, then we will see whether the fix worked (the issue is rare enough that it isn’t possible to tell anything before rolling out the fix to the entire user base). If you are interested, the details are listed in issue 361.

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Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Chrome and Opera released · 2014-01-29 17:38 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7.3 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

This release fixes pop-up blocking that was broken in the previous release. It also addresses a long standing issue, the size of the “Block element” dialog wasn’t always set correctly.

Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-12-19 14:36 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7.2 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

The previous release introduced issues with some old Chrome versions (reported for Chrome 24 and 25), element hiding wouldn’t work there. These have now been fixed. Also, the download size has been reduced again.

Adblock Plus 1.7 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-12-18 15:57 by Thomas Greiner

Install Adblock Plus 1.7 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.7 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

This release includes significant changes to the icon and the icon popup. It is the next step in redesigning the entire UI after releasing new versions of our first-run page on all platforms earlier this year.

The redesigned popup allows us to seamlessly integrate features such as the blocked ads counter and the emergency notifications. Users who want to hide the icon can now right-click on it and hide it from there which is why we removed the related option from the Options page. The icon can be brought back on the browser’s Extensions page.

Changes in detail

Icon popup has been redesigned.
Extension icon has been improved and relocated from the address bar to the browser toolbar.
The number of blocked elements on the current page can be displayed in the icon now.
Simplified selecting element to block on some websites, if the element selected cannot be blocked its parent container will be selected instead.
Selection of element to block now reacts to Enter and Esc hotkeys (select element and cancel selection respectively).
Fixed: Selecting element to block didn’t prevent links from being followed.
Fixed: Elements would sometimes be stuck with wrong background color after “Block element” menu item was used and canceled.

Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-10-16 17:13 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.6.1 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

Common changes

Some missing translations for the first-run page are now included.
Fixed: Data corruption warning was showing up for the initial installation.

Opera-only changes

Pop-up blocking has been enabled, current Opera versions now have the necessary functionality.
Fixed: First-run page sometimes didn’t show up (worked around a bug that Opera apparently ported from Presto to Chromium).

Adblock Plus 2.4 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.6 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-10-09 16:52 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.4 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.6 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.6 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

This release improves the first-run page that is common in all three browsers. We redesigned it once again and made sure that new users get a better overview.

Firefox-only changes

Fixed: Adblock Plus icon wasn’t showing up on browser startup for some users.
Fixed: Redirect blocking wasn’t working in current Firefox versions.
Fixed: Issue reporter fails to process some console errors.
Fixed: Adblock Plus fails to start up when updating in current Firefox nightly builds (workaround for bug 924340).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

The number of ads blocked on a page and in total now shows up when in the icon is clicked.

Note: This is the last Adblock Plus for Chrome release where we use Argentinian Spanish when the locale selected in Chrome is “Latin American Spanish.” Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t allow supporting the many existing Latin American Spanish dialects properly. However, we’ve determined that Mexican Spanish will be a better choice for the Latin American region and future releases will use that locale.

First-run page redesigned - again · 2013-10-05 12:29 by Wladimir Palant

We are continuing to improve the Adblock Plus first-run page to make sure it provides the best possible overview. The current round of development builds (Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3725 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.5.5.998 for Chrome and Opera) contains a redesigned first-run page again, I hope you like it. If you are updating from a previous version this page won’t show up of course — you can still open it by typing the address into the location bar manually. The address is chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html in Firefox and chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome and Opera.

Note: The “Contributor Credits” link at the bottom of the first-run page isn’t hooked up yet, this page will be online soon however.

In addition, the Chrome and Opera builds now have an ad counting feature. Whenever you click the Adblock Plus icon you should get the number of ads blocked on the particular page and the total number of blocked ads (similar information is shown in the icon’s tooltip in Firefox). The total number will only consider the ads blocked after updating to this build. Please don’t comment on the design of this feature, we are working on an improved design already.

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Adblock Plus 1.5.5 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-09-02 13:13 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.5.5 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.5 for Opera

This release implements a partial work-around for Chromium bug 281711. This bug prevented Adblock Plus from blocking ads on pages that were opened from Flash (e.g. when people clicked the YouTube link inside a YouTube video).