Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 2.2.4 for Firefox released · 2013-05-08 17:09 by Wladimir Palant
This release fixes an issue when running Adblock Plus in the upcoming Firefox 22 release (no colors/images in filters list and list of blockable items). It also fixes a mistaken typo correction when a domain name with a trailing dot is entered.
Update (2013-05-10): As we are signing our releases again, support for Firefox 15 and below had to be dropped due to significant bugs in the way extension signatures are verified (bug 765676 and bug 726125). If you are affected by this, please update to a Firefox version still supported by Mozilla – at the moment this means Firefox 20 (recommended) or Firefox 17 ESR. Older releases are not safe to use!
The Future of Facebook Ads (and how Adblock Plus will deal with them) · 2013-05-07 15:16 by MonztA
Advertising on Facebook started in 2006 with a simple banner ad syndication deal with Microsoft and a one-year marketing experiment by Chase credit card. Fast-forward to 2013 and Facebook now offers Facebook Ads, Sponsored Stories, Sponsored Stories within the News Feed, Promoted Posts, Sponsored Apps and Event Sponsorship. Next, it is rumored that Facebook will begin selling $1 million-dollar-per-day video ads that auto-play and cover both the left- and right-hand rails of users’ screens.
200 million Firefox downloads · 2013-04-24 16:17 by Wladimir Palant
As Adblock Plus is growing rapidly, we are constantly breaking new thresholds. Today, world’s most popular extension has achieved a new milestone that no one before us was able to reach: we have reached the 200th million download on Firefox. This makes Adblock Plus the first browser add-on ever to generate that many downloads on a single platform.
Adblock Plus Creative Challenge · 2013-04-08 10:08 by Wladimir Palant
As some of you might have noticed, we have launched the Adblock Plus Creative Challenge. This is a video contest, where filmmakers have to shoot an “anti-ad”.
Adblock Plus 2.2.3 for Firefox released · 2013-02-13 17:51 by Wladimir Palant
This release mostly works around breakage caused by AVG Security Toolbar 14.0.3.* extension, it prevented Adblock Plus from working correctly among other things. Other changes:
- Made sure that first-run page always opens is the current browser window (bug 819561).
Worked around AVG Security Toolbar issue · 2013-02-07 16:21 by Wladimir Palant
Current Adblock Plus versions are broken if AVG Security Toolbar 14.0.3.14 is installed. Investigation turned up a serious issue in AVG Security Toolbar affecting a lot more than just Adblock Plus and AVG has been notified about it. In the meantime the current Adblock Plus development build (Adblock Plus 2.2.3a.3629) implements a work-around that allows it to function properly nevertheless. Unless any issues pop up we are going to release Adblock Plus 2.2.3 with this fix next Tuesday.
Adblock Plus 2.2.2 for Firefox released · 2013-01-30 18:51 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Worked around regression in Firefox 18 causing entries on the blockable items list to disappear and preventing context menu from working reliably.
- Issue reporter now encourages users to enter an email address when submitting issue reports.
- Removed Do-Not-Track handling which is redundant with Firefox supporting it as well (blog post).
- Added support for per-window private browsing in Firefox 20.
- Fixed: Changes in Firefox 19 broke issue reporter.
- Fixed: “null” access keys show up in Firefox 20.
- Fixed: Context menu broken on background images in Firefox 20.
New adblockplus.org · 2013-01-10 16:31 by Felix Dahlke
As of now, the new adblockplus.org is finally online. These were some of our goals for the new website:
- More appealing, yet simple design
- Better navigation
- A decent mobile version
- Should work in any popular browser, including Internet Explorer 6
- Should work with JavaScript disabled
- A single landing page, not one for each platform
I believe we’ve managed all that, what do you think?
Read on if you’re interested in the technical side.
Some Firefox 20 compatibility fixes · 2012-12-19 15:52 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 2.2.2a.3602 fixes a bunch of issues currently affecting users of Firefox nightly builds (Firefox 20):
- Issue reporter hangs up while collecting data
- The new per-window private browsing mode isn’t properly respected, hits are still counted
- Toolbar icon menu lists “null” access keys
This build also removes Do-Not-Track support as announced earlier. Adblock Plus will still recognize rules like *$donottrack to prevent them from causing issues but they won’t have any effect.
Sorry about the server outage · 2012-11-23 14:20 by Wladimir Palant
Following the Adblock Plus 2.2 release yesterday our server became pretty much unreachable. This was the result of the new typo correction feature downloading its database. Unfortunately, while I was very focused on ensuring that this feature has the necessary quality I entirely forgot what this one server request per user would mean for our old server which cannot really handle much load. A new server with much more resources is handling this now but that change still took a day to propagate. Sorry about that, again a lesson learned.