Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Removed support for the $collapse and $object-subrequest filter options · 2019-05-15 04:00 by Sebastian Noack
Filters using the filter option $~collapse (element collapsing is enabled by default, the tilde negates the option) blocked requests without hiding the associated element, causing a placeholder to show up. Historically, this made it more difficult for some websites to detect the presence of an ad blocker. However, this filter option is currently largely unused. Hence we decided to unsupport that feature (core#1).
On Firefox, the $object-subrequest filter option only targeted requests sent by content that is managed by plugins like Flash. However, other browsers never allowed extensions to distinguish requests loading the component managed by a plugin from subsequent requests sent by that component. So on Chromium-based browsers, the $object and $object-subrequest filter options always had the same effect. With the decrease in relevance of plugins like Flash, and lack of cross-browser support, there is now a stronger case for consistent filter behavior across browsers than slightly more fine-grained request matching on Firefox only. So with this change (core#6), the $object filter option will match all requests related to plugins on all browsers.
Note that filters using the $collapse or $object-subrequest filter options will become invalid and have no effect in upcoming versions of Adblock Plus. We advise filter list authors to update their filter lists, removing any $collapse filter option and replacing any $object-subrequest filter option with the $object filter option.
These changes are now visible in the development builds of as of 3.5.2.2320, and will be released with Adblock Plus 3.6 for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
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