Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

Acceptable Ads by the numbers · 2013-10-07 15:53 by Ben Williams

Our first-ever release of statistics on the Acceptable Ads initiative.

777 whitelist applicants, over 50 percent rejected because ads not acceptable.
In all, we accepted only 9.5 percent of applicants.
148 whitelist proposals, over 90 percent for free.

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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An open letter to Twitter · 2013-10-04 15:48 by Ben Williams

Dear Twitter,
We’ve been reading the early media analysis of your IPO filing, and we are not surprised that many industry pundits are speculating about how you are probably going to become more aggressive with your advertising. BuzzFeed cautioned “expect more ads”; Forbes said the IPO could “juice ad offerings”; and the Wall Street Journal admonished “don’t do what Facebook did.” We read about your deals with CBS and the NFL – which means ads galore and happy investors.

Weird SSL misconfigurations · 2013-10-01 13:40 by Wladimir Palant

TL;DR: Some Firefox installations don’t support strong encryption and I wonder why that is.

There is one issue with relying on community-supplied filter lists in Adblock Plus: these lists are sometimes hosted on unreliable services that will go down without any prior notice. That’s why a fallback solution had to be designed in the early stages of the projects: if a client cannot reach a filter download server several times in a row it should query a fallback URL which could reply with a new location for that filter list. These fallback requests can also be used to notice issues with filter downloads that the owners of the filter lists didn’t notice themselves.

"No Adblock Plus icon" issue in Firefox fixed for some scenarios · 2013-10-01 12:36 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 2.3.2.3721 for Firefox should resolve a long-standing issue where some people didn’t have any Adblock Plus user interface (especially no icon) in the Firefox windows opened on startup. We could trace that issue back to delays in the Firefox startup sequence, e.g. caused by a master password prompt showing up before any Firefox windows. The result was Adblock Plus not “noticing” these windows when it initialized.

Technical details: This issue was introduced in February by our fix for bug 819561 (Pages opened by Adblock Plus during installation should open in the same PB window). There we switched to a different approach to enumerate Firefox windows. However, this enumeration approach turned out to ignore windows that were already open but didn’t become visible yet. Now we are combining both enumeration approaches to make sure that no windows are missed.

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Adblock Plus 2.3.2 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-07-29 13:08 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.3.2 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.3 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

This is a bugfix release that fixes an issue with the newly introduced emergency notification mechanism.

Adblock Plus 2.3.1 for Firefox, Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Chrome and Opera released · 2013-07-24 14:00 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.5.2 for Opera (Opera 15 or higher required)

Note: The originally released Adblock Plus 1.5.1 for Chrome and Opera had a bug that reset the filter settings. Adblock Plus 1.5.2 fixes that issue and restores the original data.

Changes

Improved filter list downloads.
Implemented filter forward-compatibility proposal.
Implemented an emergency notification mechanism that can be used to communicate important issues.

Notifications in Adblock Plus · 2013-07-23 16:20 by Felix Dahlke

We’re adding a new feature to Adblock Plus: Notifications.

The reason is that we sometimes need to notify users about serious issues without requiring them to update Adblock Plus. The worst-case scenario is that some users cannot receive automatic updates and we will use this feature to help the users update Adblock Plus manually. This will hopefully never happen for most users though.

We’re also planning to use it for other things, but sparingly. For example to ask a small set of users to participate in a new survey, should we ever run one again.

For now, this is only implemented in Firefox and Chrome, but we’re planning to bring it to all platforms. Firefox development build users should have it as of today, Chrome development build users should get it tomorrow. We have put up a test message for development build users, to make sure the feature works properly before we roll it out to everyone.

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Subscription downloads refactoring · 2013-07-17 15:25 by Wladimir Palant

A large batch of changes landed in Adblock Plus 2.3.0.3689 for Firefox as well as Adblock Plus 1.5.0.957 for Chrome and Opera. These implement most of the proposal to simplify subscription downloads (updating documentation still outstanding) and part of the proposal to improve forward compatibility of filters. For users, nothing should change — subscriptions should update as usually and manual subscription updates should work as they did before. There is a bunch of changes for subscription authors however:

HTTP headers that were previously considered by Adblock Plus no longer are, special comments are now the only way to tell Adblock Plus something. All special comments have the format ! Foo: bar and won’t appear in the list of filters (previously this was inconsistent).
There is a new special comment: ! Version: 1234 (must be a number). We might use it for incremental downloads later, at the moment this is only there to allow distinct versions of filter lists that can be part of the issue reporter data for example (will be implemented soon).
The special comment ! Redirect: foo no longer needs a day to take effect, Adblock Plus will rather try to download from the new location immediately. Any filters in a filter list containing this comment are ignored.
The special comment ! Expires: foo can no specify any update interval between 1 hour and 14 days. If this comment is missing or invalid, the new default value is 5 days.
When Adblock Plus downloads the filter subscription there will be additional parameters added to the URL of the request: addonName (normally “adblockplus”, “adblockpluschrome” or “adblockplusopera”), addonVersion (version of the add-on), application (e.g. “firefox” or “chrome”) and lastVersion (last version that was downloaded by this client). This allows serving different data to different clients if there are serious compatibility issues that cannot be resolved by other means.

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