Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.9.1 for Firefox released · 2017-06-07 20:11 by Wladimir Palant

Unfortunately, the Adblock Plus 2.9 release didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped for. Most importantly, the performance degradation caused by the new data storage turned out more severe than we expected, some users were experiencing regular noticeable browser hangs. While the performance of reading and saving Adblock Plus filters hasn’t improved yet, we turned off filter hit counts by default in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 as a first consequence to make sure the data no longer needs to be saved that often (issue 5298). Users who need this functionality can turn it back on by clicking the ABP icon, going into “Options” and checking “Count filter hits.” We will be looking into other ways to improve this, even though the main issue can only be resolved by the Firefox developers.

It also wasn’t noticed before release that the new data storage doesn’t work in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, so these users ended up with filters being reset on each restart. This has also been resolved in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 (issue 5279, issue 5285), the original data should show up again now. Some users are reporting similar issues in Firefox, a problem we couldn’t reproduce so far. If you are experiencing data loss on Firefox and are willing to let me debug the issue on your computer (via TeamViewer or a similar desktop sharing tool), please let me know in the comments below.

Fixing Adblock Plus 2.9 for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey users · 2017-06-01 14:23 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 2.9 introduced very significant changes to the data storage. The unfortunate side-effect was that Adblock Plus was broken for Thunderbird users as well as users on pre-release SeaMonkey versions, and nobody noticed before the release. After we discovered a problem with our original fix, as of Adblock Plus 2.9.0.4251-beta development build things should work correctly on all platforms. This being a rather non-trivial change, your feedback is appreciated. If no other issues pop up we plan to release Adblock Plus 2.9.1 next Tuesday, June 6.

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Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox released · 2017-05-25 13:34 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox

This release lays important groundwork for the Web Extensions migration. The way Adblock Plus stores its data has changed drastically, though for users everything should stay exactly the same (issue 5048). The new location of your filters and subscriptions is the browser-extension-data/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}/storage.js file in your Firefox profile, the same data will be used by the Adblock Plus build based on the Web Extensions platform once it is ready.

Additional changes

The hidden data_directory and please_kill_startup_performance preferences have been removed.
It is now possible to use { and } in CSS property filters (issue 4684).

The plan towards offering Adblock Plus for Firefox as a Web Extension · 2017-04-12 08:23 by Wladimir Palant

TL;DR: Sometime in autumn this year the current Adblock Plus for Firefox extension is going to be replaced by another, which is more similar to Adblock Plus for Chrome. Brace for impact!

New data storage in Adblock Plus for Firefox · 2017-04-11 11:42 by Wladimir Palant

As of Firefox 57, classic extensions such as the current Adblock Plus for Firefox will no longer load and only Web Extensions will be allowed to continue working. In order to prepare for the transition, starting with Adblock Plus 2.8.2.4244 development build we will use Web Extensions for data storage. Any existing data (this includes both current filters/subscriptions and automatic backups) will be taken over automatically and ideally there should be no visible changes at this point. However, the data will no longer be stored in the adblockplus/patterns.ini file of your Firefox profile but rather in the browser-extension-data/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}/storage.json file.

Please tell us about any data loss issues you encounter after this change. We are moving towards releasing Adblock Plus 2.9 which will start data migration for our entire user base. Note that the format of the Web Extensions storage is still supposed to change which will hopefully make it more robust and performant.

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Do you #blockbetter? Tell us how and win a smartphone of your choice! · 2017-03-28 14:00 by Peter van Dijk

We know there are a million reasons to use Adblock Plus with the Acceptable Ads program, but what we really want to know is yours!

Celebrate and share a safer Internet with us today! · 2017-02-07 10:05 by Peter van Dijk

Did you know today is the official Safer Internet Day? No? Well, now you do! Today is about celebrating all the accomplishments we have achieved in the past years to make the Internet a better and safer place for everyone.

Why you will always have a choice to switch off Acceptable Ads, and why you shouldn’t - an opinion piece · 2016-12-14 14:46 by Peter van Dijk

The advertising business in general has gone down the wrong rabbit hole. It’s all about getting clicks. To find out why the Acceptable Ads initiative is the most sensible choice despite all of this, read more in this personal opinion piece.

Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox released · 2016-11-22 18:17 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox

This is a maintenance release, most importantly introducing some improvements to CSS property filters.

Additional changes

Made sure that element hiding rules don’t affect browser’s and extensions’ special pages, this regressed with Adblock Plus 2.8 (issue 4624, issue 4625).
Fixed blockable items list slowing down page loading (issue 4587).
Pop-ups using data: URLs and similar unusual schemes can be blocked now (issue 4368).
When selecting keyboard shortcuts, more shortcut keys already in use by the browser can be recognized. This will change the shortcut key to show Blockable items list from Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-V to Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-U for pretty much everybody (issue 4544).

CSS property matching improvements · 2016-11-14 13:05 by Felix Dahlke

About a year ago, we introduced CSS property filters as a means of hiding elements based on their styles. Today, we have landed two improvements to this:

Case insensitive matching

This is a change in semantics; CSS properties will now always be matched in a case insensitive manner, to make it consistent with the way Adblock Plus matches URLs. This is unlikely to result in undesired behaviour as there shouldn’t be many use cases for case sensitive property matching.

Regular expression matching

Until now, CSS properties could only be matched using the simple URL matching syntax, which made it difficult to match property values in a fine-grained manner. To address this, properties can now optionally be matched using regular expressions. The default matching behaviour is still the same, to use regular expressions, a matching expression needs to start and end with /, for example:

example.com##[-abp-properties='/width: 3[2-8]px;/']

These improvements are available in Adblock Plus for Firefox as of 2.8.1.4229 and Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera as of 1.12.4.1682, and will presumably be released with the next stable version on each platform respectively.

Please note that we still consider CSS property filters an experimental feature, and therefore subject to change. Considering this, and the fact that CSS property filters are slower than regular element hiding rules, they should only be used as a last resort.

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