Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.5.1 for Firefox released · 2014-02-20 19:06 by Thomas Greiner

This release introduces a new notification that shows up the first time users visit a website which show obtrusive anti-adblock messages asking them whether to block those or not. Apart from this addition it also includes the following changes:

Fixed: Pipe character in filters interpreted wrong under some circumstances
Fixed: Share window on first-run page doesn’t appear

New blog · 2014-02-13 11:06 by Wladimir Palant

For a while, I have been occasionally misusing the Adblock Plus project blog for articles that had no relation to Adblock Plus whatsoever. I posted various articles on security, Mozilla and XULRunner there, general extension development advise, occasionally some private stuff. With the project growing and more people joining I am no longer the only person posting to the Adblock Plus blog, treating it as my private blog isn’t appropriate. So a while ago I decided to set up a separate private blog for myself and now I finally found the time to implement this. My off-topic blog posts have been migrated to the new location. Now you can read my blog if you are interested in the random stuff I post there, or you can keep reading the Adblock Plus blog if all you are interested in is Adblock Plus.

Adblock Plus 2.4.1 for Firefox released · 2014-01-14 17:04 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.4.1 for Firefox

This release introduces support for the Australis theme that will be introduced in future Firefox versions. Other changes:

Default icon location is the navigation toolbar again (add-on bar is going away).
Fixed image preview in the list of blockable items (forum topic).
Fixed keyboard shortcut on Mac OS X (Control key was used instead of Command).
Fixed: Changes to Adblock Plus options didn’t always persist.

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:

Links not working on a website? You can fix that! · 2013-12-04 10:42 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus users who decided to disable tracking have been complaining about severe issues on some websites for a while already. On the websites in question, clicking a link simply wouldn’t do anything unless one disables Adblock Plus. Our investigation has shown that bugs in Adobe SiteCatalyst are to blame for this issue. SiteCatalyst is a tracking solution that Adobe acquired from Omniture. A “forced link tracking” feature introduced recently is the source of these issues. Originally it was enabled for Google Chrome only, in a follow-up version for Mozilla Firefox as well.

Australis theme support · 2013-12-02 12:25 by Wladimir Palant

Two weeks ago the Australis theme landed in the Firefox nightly builds. This is easily the largest Firefox user interface change since Firefox 4 and it is still being tested — it will take several months until it hits stable releases. Along with lots of visual improvements (like making toolbar customization discoverable) the toolbar customization mechanism has been overhauled, a long overdue change. The necessary changes to support the new toolbar customization now landed in the Adblock Plus development builds (starting with Adblock Plus 2.4.0.3745), these can now rely on Firefox to remember the position of our icon correctly instead of reimplementing everything. In addition to everything working correctly, there are only few changes you should expect:

The default position of our icon is the main toolbar again, not the add-on bar (the add-on bar is gone with the Australis theme, this concept proved nonviable).
The icon can be placed in the Australis “Customize and Control” panel and will show up with a large icon there as well as in the customization palette.
Australis will not remember the previous position of the icon. This means, if you uncheck “Show in toolbar” in the Adblock Plus preferences and then check it again the icon will be displayed at its default position rather than the position where you’ve previously put it. From what I can tell, this is the only piece of functionality lost, it’s a minor one however.

There is one more change in this development build: the tooltip on images in Blockable Items list will show the image again if is cached (this feature was broken for some time).

To the install page

Pure YouTube Video Experience · 2013-11-21 17:07 by MonztA

YouTube is changing, but according to its users it may not be for the better. The most recent example of this was their recent decision to force their users to use the Google Plus commenting system, making it impossible to remain anonymous. Even though hundreds of thousands are campaigning against it, it looks as if their voices will be ignored. there is little hope that it will actually change.

How to get rid of the new photo preview feature on Twitter · 2013-11-06 18:26 by MonztA

As usual, it seems, it is the user who must adapt to changes and new rules. This time it’s Twitter changing the layout of its timeline, both in its web client and mobile version. The most notable change is that users are being served a pre-displayed image that expands when they click on it. On the Twitter mobile client, you can disable this feature by unchecking the “photo preview” box; but there is no way to opt out on its web client unless you use the filter we specifically created for it.

Customizable Facebook page · 2013-10-21 18:14 by Sven Hartz

You can now customize Facebook with Adblock Plus. Under default settings, ABP blocks all Facebook ads – sponsored stories, page post ads, standard ads, promoted posts or otherwise. But there are other unneeded, potentially unwanted elements that insert themselves automatically into your news feed and sidebar. Now you can block these too.

Go to facebook.adblockplus.me to choose which of these elements you’d like to block.

Adblock Plus development IRC channel is now open · 2013-10-21 17:13 by Wladimir Palant

One unfortunate side-effect of the fact that most Adblock Plus developers are Eyeo employees is many of the decisions being made away from public places. This is a suboptimal situation that we need to improve in order for our project to become more transparent again and to invite participation. We have been discussing ways to improve this and one first step is opening the IRC channel we use for development-related discussion: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#adblockplus (there is a web-based client if you prefer).

Please don’t use this channel if you need support, the right place for that is still our forum. In fact, I’ve been reluctant about opening the IRC channel because I’ve seen development-related channels being flooded by unrelated discussion to the point that they couldn’t be used for the original purpose any more. So you should really only be using this channel if you are interested in Adblock Plus development.

There will be more announcements soon, please stay tuned.