Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.8.1 for Firefox released · 2016-10-28 14:37 by Wladimir Palant

Our Adblock Plus 2.8 release introduced a regression that went unnoticed for months in the development builds. Users who activated the please_kill_startup_performance preference were experiencing data loss: filters didn’t load completely. Also, importing custom filters was failing for large files. Both issues have the same root cause (issue 4576) and have been resolved in Adblock Plus 2.8.1. If your data is still incomplete after updating to Adblock Plus 2.8.1 please click the “Backup and Restore” button in Filter Preferences — one of the automatically created backups is certain to be correct.

Adblock Plus 2.8 for Firefox released · 2016-10-25 12:38 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.8 for Firefox

This release changes the way element hiding works in Firefox, so that noticeable delays from changing a single element hiding rule should be no more. Also, the behavior should be more consistent now and filters not applying on a particular website should no longer be able to cause unexpected side-effects. On the downside, changes to element hiding rules will only apply after a page is reloaded now (which is actually consistent with blocking rules).

Additional changes

There is a special $websocket type option now to block WebSocket requests, the type was previously considered to be other here (announcement).
Our toolbar icon will look better on high-resolution screens (issue 4142).
Removed feature selection from the first-run page until the features can be removed similarly easily (issue 4294).
Hits for CSS property filters which were introduced in the previous release are being counted now (issue 3969).
Fixed: CSS property filters applied even when Adblock Plus was disabled everywhere (issue 4201).
Fixed: A regression in pop-up blocking functionality caused websites to be mistakenly considered pop-ups under some circumstances (issue 4335).
Corrected handling of frames with srcdoc attribute.
Fixed and improved search functionality in Filter Preferences, was partially broken in Firefox nightly builds (issue 4510).

New element hiding approach in Firefox · 2016-10-10 15:46 by Wladimir Palant

Traditionally, element hiding on Firefox worked quite differently from all other platforms supported by Adblock Plus. Rather than decide on the filters for each website individually, all element hiding rules would be written into a single elemhide.css stylesheet file that would apply to all websites unconditionally. This approach had a few disadvantages:

The global stylesheet could not consider exceptions, such as websites where a particular rule should not apply — we had to implement a complicated mechanism to make sure that the rule didn’t have any effect in such cases, and on some websites there still were side-effects.
Changing a single element hiding rule caused the global stylesheet to apply again to all open tabs, this could cause significant delays.
With multiprocess Firefox coming up and sandboxing enabled on some platforms, we could no longer rely on being able to access that file.

Luckily, Firefox implemented better mechanisms to apply stylesheets to documents a while ago and as of Adblock Plus 2.7.3.4206-beta development build we are now taking full advantage of these. We will now make a separate decision for each website, which (if any) element hiding rules should apply. And we don’t sacrifice performance for that because the majority of element hiding rules will go into a preloaded stylesheet with all the rules which apply unconditionally.

There are a few drawbacks here:

New element hiding rules will no longer apply immediately, just like blocking rules they now require the document to be reloaded (can actually be seen as a good thing because consistent). This also affects Element Hiding Helper extension which will need to be updated.
We are no longer able to count hits for element hiding exception rules (issue 4509). We simply don’t know any more whether the rule that the exception applies to would have matched anything.
Element hiding rules apply with a slight delay which in theory might cause some ads being shown and then flashing out. In practice, I haven’t seen this yet.

This is a huge change to the inner workings of Adblock Plus and while we tested it quite thoroughly some issues are expected — let us know if you notice any.

To the install page

New filter type option for WebSockets · 2016-09-21 14:30 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Adblock Plus 1.12.2 for Chrome, Opera and Safari we can block connections initiated via WebSockets on all major platforms (this functionality was available on Firefox since the very start). However, we didn’t have a special type for these requests as these were listed with type “other” instead. The assumption was that the protocol ws:// or wss:// would be sufficient for filter list authors in order to target WebSocket connections specifically. However, we received feedback that this wasn’t the case.

So with the current development builds (Adblock Plus 2.7.3.4202 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.12.2.1655 for Google Chrome, Opera and Safari) WebSocket connections are listed with the new type “websocket.” Consequently, filters can be made to target such connections specifically by adding $websocket type option. Existing filters will have to be duplicated for now:

something$websocket
something$other

This syntax will support both new and old Adblock Plus versions as long as the versions without support for the “websocket” type are still common (these will ignore the first filter).

To the install page

Edit (2016-09-22): This post was originally suggesting specifying both websocket and other options on one filter. This approach will not work in Adblock Plus versions without support for the websocket option because filters with unknown options are ignored.

Clearing up some things from this week! · 2016-09-16 17:37 by Rachel Brochado

There has been a lot of misinformation floating around these past few days about Adblock Plus and Acceptable Ads and the Acceptable Ads Platform, so let us try and clear up the most common ones.

Adblock Plus 2.7.3 for Firefox released · 2016-04-27 14:32 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.7.3 for Firefox

This release adds support for the experimental CSS properties syntax to Adblock Plus for Firefox (issue 2401, issue 3955). This support isn’t complete yet, most important issue being that hits are not counted for CSS properties filters (issue 3969).

Additional changes

Fixed issues that Adblock Plus could potentially cause on Firefox startup (issue 2850).
Some first-run page optimizations (issue 2668, issue 1292, issue 3736, issue 3814).
Cleaned up internal messaging approach (issue 3499, issue 3851, issue 3853).

Adblock Plus 2.7.2 for Firefox released · 2016-02-23 16:42 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.7.2 for Firefox

This release works around some obscure Firefox bugs which Adblock Plus has been triggering since Adblock Plus 2.7 release (visible for example as issue 3489, issue 3541, bug 1127744).

Additional changes

Closed a pop-up blocking loophole misused by some websites (issue 3568).
Fixed tooltip display for very long filters (issue 1950).

Adblock Plus now available for Samsung devices · 2016-02-01 13:57 by Job Plas

Samsung, the world’s largest mobile hardware manufacturer, today introduced content blocking functionality in the default Samsung Browser for all their devices.

Adblock Plus 2.7.1 for Firefox released · 2016-01-19 15:08 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.7.1 for Firefox

With this release Adblock Plus becomes fully compatible with the upcoming multi-process mode in Firefox, it no longer relies on backwards compatibility hacks in Firefox (issue 3259, issue 3407, issue 3449, issue 3465, issue 3486, issue 3494). This also means that the screenshot functionality in Issue Reporter is fully functional now (issue 3375), and also quite fast (issue 3504).

Additional changes

Improved performance: patterns.ini was being saved way more often than necessary (issue 3473).
$ping filter option is back and will especially apply to requests sent via navigator.sendBeacon() (issue 3452).
Requests produced by <img srcset> and <picture> will be assigned type image (issue 3459).
Requests produced by the Fetch API will be assigned type xmlhttprequest (issue 3459).
genericblock and generichide types will no longer show up in the filter assistant (issue 3478).
Removed non-standard JavaScript syntax, which caused warnings in Firefox Aurora and Nightly builds (issue 1434, issue 3418, issue 3421, issue 3502, issue 3505).
Fixed: Previously disabled and removed filter is still disabled when added back (issue 3451).

Regressions fixed

As the previous release changed Adblock Plus quite drastically, it inevitably introduced some issues. As far as we know, all of these have been resolved:

Pop-up blocking doesn’t catch redirects to a different domain (issue 3458).
Issue Reporter gets stuck if filter subscriptions need updating (issue 3461, issue 3464).
Screenshot marker in Issue Reporter is no longer red (issue 3503).
Fixed image preview in Blockable Items tooltip (issue 3491).

Known issues

Element hiding functionality isn’t working on Mac OS X when multi-process mode is enabled (bug 1187099). Mozilla is working on this.

Finished support for multi-process Firefox · 2016-01-11 12:58 by Wladimir Palant

We continued working on improving our support for multi-process Firefox. So far we have still been relying on backwards compatibility code in Firefox which is slow and error-prone. However, starting with Adblock Plus 2.7.0.4123-beta development build that backwards compatibility code no longer applies to Adblock Plus — now we are on our own. As far as I know, all issues have been resolved, with one exception:

Element hiding functionality isn’t working on Mac OS X when multi-process is enabled (bug 1187099). Mozilla is fixing this, we might also implement our own workaround however.

This development build is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.7.1 which we plan to release on January 19, 2016. Please tell us if you notice any other issues, particularly around Blockable items list and Issue reporter.

To the install page