Adblock Plus and (a little) more
"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.
Fixed Enhanced Protected Mode support on Windows 8 · 2013-09-25 12:57 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that Enhanced Protected Mode support in the previous development build wasn’t quite working correctly, people using Windows 8 were experiencing hangs. This issue should be resolved in Adblock Plus for IE 1.0.537. Please help us test this new development build.
There is a crash when uploading email attachments that we would still like to fix before the release. Other than that no more changes are expected.
Enhanced Protected Mode support in IE · 2013-09-19 08:10 by Felix Dahlke
Adblock Plus for IE 1.0.533 now supports Enhanced Protected Mode, which is available since Internet Explorer 10 and enabled per default in Internet Explorer 11.
So if you’re on IE10 or IE11 and disabled Enhanced Protected Mode to make Adblock Plus work, please enable it again and help us test it.
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.
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: barand 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: foono 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: foocan 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”) andlastVersion(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.
Adblock Plus 2.3 release candidate available · 2013-07-03 15:42 by Wladimir Palant
It took us some more time than we expected when the previous announcement was published but we now have some release candidates: Adblock Plus 2.2.5a.3667 for Firefox as well as Adblock Plus 1.4.1.944 for Chrome and Opera. The planned release date for Adblock Plus 2.3 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.5 for Chrome and Opera is 2013-07-09. Changes since the previous announcement:
- Better buttons on the first-run page
- Firefox only: typo correction feature has been removed (reasoning)
- Firefox only: better localization approach (won’t be visible in this build but should hopefully improve translation quality in the final release)
Known issue: in the Filter Preferences of the Firefox build, access key of the “Backup and Restore” button doesn’t work.
New first-run page · 2013-05-29 22:50 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.2.5a.3659 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.4.1.942 for Chrome we have a new first-run page:
This is a further improvement from the first-run page we already had in Chrome, now we finally have the same page in the Firefox extension as well. In addition to a more concise explanation of acceptable ads, the idea was to provide an overview of what Adblock Plus can do and allow turning on optional features easily. We are still planning to tweak the buttons and a few minor things but other than that the design is final — the release is supposed to happen in two weeks.
The first-run page comes up only during the initial installation of the extension. In Firefox (unlike in Chrome) uninstalling and reinstalling the extension doesn’t remove the data and the first-run page doesn’t appear again. If you want to see it without resetting Adblock Plus you can copy chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html into the location bar in Firefox or chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome (the latter works only for the development builds, the address in the release build is different).
Improvements to pop-up blocking in Chrome · 2013-03-05 15:51 by Wladimir Palant
Turns out that our previous release candidate wasn’t catching all the pop-ups. We’ve improved the approach in Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.3.4.919, that’s the new release candidate.
Pop-up blocking for Chrome · 2013-03-04 12:55 by Wladimir Palant
We’ve had pop-up blocking support in Firefox for quite a while already, starting with the 1.3.4.918 development build the same functionality is now available for Chrome. Again, this is to complement the built-in pop-up blocker for the cases where it fails, not to replace it. By now the subscription authors added filters for the most notorious unwanted pop-ups so these should be blocked immediately.
This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.4 for Google Chrome which is scheduled for release next Tuesday (2013-03-12).
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.