Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 4] · 2011-12-09 15:58 by Wladimir Palant

The previous part analyzed the last page of the survey where people replied on the role of Adblock Plus on the web. Of course, it would also be interesting to see whether the results are different depending on which group of survey respondents you look. I analyzed the last page for each of the survey languages separately and I’ve also created a separate analysis for “newbies” — people who said that they were using Firefox for less than one year. I’ll just publish the results here without commenting.

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 3] · 2011-12-09 15:41 by Wladimir Palant

Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions, Adblock Plus functionality. Now we want to look at how people perceive the role of Adblock Plus on the web. This was the last page of the survey.

Release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.0 available · 2011-12-09 13:54 by Wladimir Palant

All the necessary changes are done and the development builds starting with Adblock Plus 2.0rc.3323 are release candidates for Adblock Plus 2.0. If everything goes well it will be released on Monday.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Adblock Plus options are now displayed directly on its page in Add-ons Manager (in Firefox 7 and above, in older versions the Options button opens toolbar icon’s menu).
Changed the way the toolbar icon is being hidden, now it can always be brought back via toolbar customization.
Status bar icon is no longer being displayed in Firefox version with add-on bar (there is no real status bar).
List of blockable items can now be searched both by localized type name as well as by the corresponding filter option (forum topic).
When recommended subscriptions are being added the language no longer becomes part of the subscription title.
An “Adblock Plus” menu has been added to the classic Tools menu for reasons of keyboard accessibility, the Adblock Plus menu entry in the View menu has been removed.
Added a warning if a subscription contains disabled filters (forum topic).
Fixed: Don’t create new filter groups for filters being added if a user-defined group is already available (forum topic).
Fixed: Using context menu prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
Lots of polishing, especially on the new Filter Preferences dialog.

To the install page

Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus · 2011-12-05 12:19 by Wladimir Palant

The development build last Friday introduced a new feature that took many people by surprise: Allowing acceptable ads. Sorry about that, I am usually trying to announce large functionality changes in a timely manner but that didn’t work this time. As of Adblock Plus 2.0b.3277 the current state is:

“Allow non-intrusive advertising” option is enabled by default for all users but the ones using privacy filter lists (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy’s Tracking, Adverisity Privacy). The documentation explains why it has to be enabled by default.
The first-run page notifies users about this change, opt-out works by clicking “Filter Preferences” and unchecking the option there.
On the technical side, this option simply represents an additional filter subscription. The documentation describes how to view this filter subscription or disable the special treatment for it.
There is a forum topic with lots of my replies to questions concerning this feature.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

Filter search is now possible in the Filter Preferences.
“Collapse blocked elements” option has been renamed into “Hide placeholders of blocked elements”.
“Count filter hits” is now a visible option.
Added “Reset hit statistics” filter action.
Added warning for filter subscriptions requiring a newer Adblock Plus version.
Updating all filter subscriptions is now possible using Ctrl-Shift-T keyboard shortcut (not visible in the user interface).
Fixed: Filter groups should also have “Show/hide filters” in their Actions menu.
Fixed: ABP menu still has the old “Preferences” menu item.
Fixed: Dragging a filter subscription might display as a button or menu being dragged.

To the install page

New Filter Preferences dialog and more · 2011-12-01 17:25 by Wladimir Palant

Huge changes that were living on the “experimental” branch just landed, we are now in the Beta phase for Adblock Plus 2.0. The most notable changes in Adblock Plus 2.0b.3255:

New Filter Preferences dialog replaces the old Preferences dialog and hopefully makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
Custom filter groups can be created, you are no longer limited by the groups created automatically.
Filter groups can contain multiple instances of the same filter (most importantly comments).
Filter subscription is now added automatically on startup, the user no longer needs to confirm (but can easily revert the decision).
The new Backup and Restore functionality allows exporting all filter data as well as custom filters only. The latter is identical to the old Import/Export but will restore filter groups.

While this functionality is finally usable we are not done yet. There are multiple known issues, most of them should be fixed over the course of the next few days:

Resetting hit counts isn’t possible yet.
Searching filters isn’t possible yet.
There is no warning message if the filter subscription requires a newer Adblock Plus version.
Filter actions and “Add filter” don’t appear disabled even when they are unavailable.
Creating filters via filter composer will create a new special filter group even when user-defined groups are available.
Filter editor ignores Home and End keys (not sure whether this can be fixed).
Actions executed on many filters (delete or remove) might take too long.

Some things that won’t change:

Enter key closes the Filter Preferences dialog, F2 has to be used to start editing a filter.
Filter editor no longer has a Close button.

If you find something else, please comment here or report a bug.

To the install page

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 2] · 2011-11-07 15:03 by Wladimir Palant

Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions. Now we want to look at questions about Adblock Plus functionality.

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 1] · 2011-11-07 12:18 by Wladimir Palant

The previous blog post explains how we implemented the survey, now it is time to start analyzing the results (sorry about keeping you waiting). Here we want to look at the results of the first page where we asked general questions, mainly to get an idea of who is responding and to allow segmentation of the results. By now we have 1552 completed submissions. The number of answers is slightly different for each question however — all answers were optional and we had to throw out some answers because they were clearly invalid.

Tags: adblock plus

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 0] · 2011-10-10 10:43 by Wladimir Palant

Please note that this will be the only post to be syndicated to Planet Mozilla, the other parts of this series will appear in my blog only — I can imagine that most readers of Planet have very little interest in what I am writing here. If you are interested in the full analysis of the results, please visit my blog in a few days.

At the moment we have 1360 responses to the user survey which is more than enough to start analyzing the results. There will be some more responses before the survey ends but we don’t expect to get much more than 1500 responses and the overall results shouldn’t change significantly.

Dropped support for old browser versions including Firefox 3.5 · 2011-10-04 10:59 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Adblock Plus 1.3.11a.3172 old browser versions based on Gecko versions older than Gecko 1.9.2.13 will no longer be supported. This change is performed to simplify Adblock Plus code as well as to make regression testing easier again. This means in detail:

Firefox 3.5 is no longer supported. Anybody still using it should update to a current Firefox version ASAP given that Firefox 3.5 is no longer supported by Mozilla and has known security issues. Similarly, Thunderbird 3.0 is no longer supported.
Only reasonably recent Firefox 3.6.x releases are supported (Firefox 3.6.13 or newer). If you are running one of the older versions you should update ASAP, at least to Firefox 3.6.23 which is the current release on this branch. Similarly, users running Thunderbird 3.1.x need Thunderbird 3.1.7 or newer (preferably Thunderbird 3.1.9 which is the current release on this branch).
Firefox Mobile 1.1 is no longer supported, at least Firefox Mobile 4.0 is required.
SeaMonkey 2.0 is no longer supported, at least SeaMonkey 2.1 is required.
Prism support has been removed. With Prism development no longer being continued the last release uses an outdated Gecko version.
Songbird support has been removed. Even most current Songbird releases use an outdated and insecure Gecko version, so using Songbird’s browser component is not recommendable.

To the install page

Experimental pop-up blocking support · 2011-10-03 16:29 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.11a.3162) added support for blocking pop-ups directly, working for Gecko 1.9.2.6 (meaning Firefox 3.6.6) and higher. Filters will not block pop-ups by default, only if the $popup type option is specified. So one can use the filter ||livejasmin.com^$popup to block all pop-up windows opening livejasmin.com. Or one could use ||livejasmin.com^$popup,domain=example.com to prevent only example.com from opening such pop-ups. Pop-ups opened by a page will appear in the list of blockable items and can be blocked from there.

For subscription authors: if you add pop-up blocking rules to your filter list you might want to do it in a backwards compatible way: ||livejasmin.com^$popup,image,~image. This makes sure that the filter doesn’t block anything in Adblock Plus versions that don’t know the $popup option.

Known issues:

If the pop-up opens in a new window rather than a new tab you will briefly see the pop-up window. This window is closed before running any code ~~and sending any network requests~~ however. Edit: The initial network request is actually being sent in this case but is canceled immediately after receiving HTTP headers.
For each pop-up opened you will see an additional about:blank entry in the list of blockable items. This is due to how Gecko works, a new window always loads about:blank before loading the actual pop-up target.
For same-origin pop-ups (opening page and pop-up are from the same host) you will get only the about:blank entry. This is a Gecko limitation, so for such pop-ups you will only be able to block all pop-ups or none.

To the install page