Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2015-01-06 20:00 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Opera
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.9 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Worked around some circumvention attempts.
Fixed: Extension pages didn’t respect direction of right-to-left languages (issue 1668).
Fixed an issue when generating filters based on the style attribute (issue 1658).
Fixed an issue where “Block element” from the context menu didn’t work or in an inferior way than from the popup (issue 1611).
When blocking elements suggest filters based on all URLs associated with the element (issue 1601).
Removed ‘Hide placeholders of blocked elements’ option from the user interface (issue 1671).
Updated the extension description (issue 1643).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Worked around a Chrome bug that caused placeholders for blocked elements to show up on some pages (issue 1703).

Safari-only changes

Fixed: <input type=image> elements were not recognized as images (issue 1644).
Fixed: Spanish (Spain) translations were used instead of Spanish (Latin America) (issue 1666).
Fixed: Popup did not respond when multiple tabs were opened simultaneously (issue 1694).

Adblock Plus 1.3 for IE released · 2014-12-15 16:43 by Oleksandr Paraska

Install Adblock Plus 1.3 for Internet Explorer

Since our last release for Internet Explorer we were very much focused on improving quality of ad blocking and hiding. Hence version 1.3 fixes a lot of issues where ABP for IE either incorrectly blocked a request, or falsely allowed the request through, when it shouldn’t have. We are quite happy with the result, and hope you’ll notice the improvement as well.

If you are interested in a bit more details, here is the list of changes that are included in Adblock Plus 1.3 for Internet Explorer

Changes

General blocking improvements (issue 1265):
- Improved detection of mime types
- Added support for XMLHttpRequests
- Added support for requests from Flash
- Improved detection of a referrer of a request.
Fix element hiding on some sites (issue 1148)
Fix incorrect blocking of video content on some sites (issue 1231)
Block video ads where they weren’t blocked before (issue 1500)
Fix “Navigation canceled” messages if IFRAME is blocked (issue 1264)
Fix version string in Add/Remove programs (issue 1222)
Changes in the First Run Page (issue 1230, issue 1356)

Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-12-02 19:32 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.8 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Added validation of custom filters, preventing users from adding filters that break element hiding (issue 491).
Fixed an issue where elements, which use a special URL and therefore aren’t blocked, are collapsed (issue 1613).
Improved and fixed some issues with the “Block element” dialog.
- Consider the style attribute as last resort, if otherwise no filter can be generated for the given element (issue 700).
- Generate element hiding filters instead of request blocking filters for elements using special URLs which can’t be blocked (issue 705).
- Use vertical scrollbars instead of wrapping long filter texts (issue 731).
- Fixed an issue where popup state wasn’t reset after closing the dialog (issue 1122).
- Fixed an error which prevented dragging the dialog to another position (issue 1516).
- Fixed insufficient escaping of CSS selectors, which broke some generated element hiding filters (issue 1527 and 1587).
- Mitigated side-effects on pages that respond to events of selected elements (issue 1603).
- Fixed: Overlays are injected for hidden elements (issue 1606).
- Fixed wrong z-index of injected overlays (issue 1607).
- Fixed an error caused by generating only a request blocking filter for an <object> element (issue 1609).
- Keep highlighting all selected elements until the dialog is closed (issue 1610).
- Fixed an issue where some elements weren’t removed immediately when the filter is saved (issue 1612).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Adapted workaround for Chrome bug causing some issues with Flash videos, for Chrome 40, Opera 27 and above (issue 1593).
Fixed: Options page isn’t opened correctly from an incognito window (issue 1268).

Safari-only changes

Fixed: Blocked frames aren’t collapsed (issue 1592).
Improved performance, by caching translations (issue 1502).

Adblock Plus 2.6.6 for Firefox released · 2014-11-11 23:59 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.6 for Firefox

There is only one change, Adblock Plus will use a slightly different approach to read files from disk (issue 1510). The reason is a change that Mozilla made for Firefox and that broke Adblock Plus completely in the Firefox nightly builds.

Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Chrome and Opera released · 2014-10-28 18:06 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)

This release only fixes an issue breaking Flash videos on Chrome 39 and Opera 26 (issue 1496). We initially addressed that issue only for Chrome 38 and Opera 25, assuming that Google fixes the Chrome bug that is causing this issue, before Chrome 39 is released. However, they didn’t yet, and it is rather unlikely that they will still fix it for Chrome 39, which is in beta now.

Note: We also released Adblock Plus 1.8.7 for Safari but there are no changes there compared to Adblock Plus 1.8.6.

Adblock Plus 2.6.5 for Firefox released · 2014-10-15 21:01 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.6.5 for Firefox

Changes

Fixed: Element hiding exceptions are broken by changes in Firefox 34 and Firefox 35 (issue 1241, issue 1381).
Fixed: Blocking via context menu won’t always suggest blocking the most recent request (issue 362).
Fixed: Issue reporter will complain about too many filter lists even when these filter lists are “special” like the anti-adblock list (issue 690).
Fixed: Disabling filters via space bar no longer works in preferences (issue 1129).
Fixed: Sharing Adblock Plus from the first-run page won’t work if the Anti-Social list is enabled (issue 1133).
Fixed: Anti-Adblock warning will sometimes appear on websites without any anti-adblock behavior (issue 1161).
Made $sitekey option behavior more consistent, it can be used similarly to $domain now rather than whitelisting complete websites only (issue 432).

Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-10-15 00:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.6 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Changes

Removed special handling for $sitekey filter option, handling them the same as the $domain option (issue 433).
Generate protocol-agnostic filters when using the “Block element” dialog (issue 704).
Fixed an issue with escaping URLs in filters generated by the “Block element” dialog (issue 1393).
Fixed an issue causing infinite recursion when blocking <input type=image> elements (issue 1396).
Disable “Block element” option on XML pages, where it doesn’t work anyway (issue 1428).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Implemented a workaround for a bug in Chrome 38 and Opera 25, which broke some Flash videos (issue 1372).
Removed side-effects introduced by the “Block element” dialog if websites change styles of highlighted elements (issue 1325).

Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-09-08 14:15 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.5 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Due to a mistake on our end, a few changes that were announced for the previous release didn’t actually make it into the builds. This is being corrected now.

Changes

Fixed: “Block Element” dialog was sometimes covered up by other page elements (issue 703).
Fixed: Checkbox labels on the options page should be clickable (issue 1226).

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Adapted for changes in Chrome 36, Opera 23 and higher. Removed side-effects of element hiding on affected websites (e.g. Outlook 365) again (issue 1290).

Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Chrome, Opera and Safari released · 2014-09-03 20:10 by Sebastian Noack

Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Opera (Opera 17 or higher required)
Install Adblock Plus 1.8.4 for Safari (Safari 6 or higher required)

Note: Some changes announced here didn’t actually make it into the build, these are part of Adblock Plus 1.8.5.

Changes

~~Fixed: “Block Element” dialog was sometimes covered up by other page elements (issue 703).~~

Chrome/Opera-only changes

Fixed element hiding and collapsing within inline frames on Chrome 36, Opera 23, and earlier (issue 581).
Fixed an issue where pages using an XSLT template were rendered blank (issue 673).
Made sure that bad filters cannot break extension pages (issue 926).
~~Adapted for changes in Chrome 36, Opera 23 and higher. Removed side-effects of element hiding on affected websites (e.g. Outlook 365) again (issue 1290).~~

Safari-only changes

Block in-video ads on YouTube when using the HTML5 player as well (issue 1258).
Worked around a JavaScript misoptimization bug in Safari 8 (issue 1273).
Fixed an issue which broke some websites when using EasyPrivacy (issue 649).
Improved performance when using many tabs (issue 654).

Adblock Plus 1.2 for Internet Explorer released · 2014-08-13 12:14 by Oleksandr Paraska

Install Adblock Plus 1.2 for Internet Explorer

It has been a long while since our previous release for Internet Explorer. We have been busy tweaking and tuning and fixing different aspects of the Internet Explorer extension for this release. There were quite a few bumps along the way which caused delays. To speedup the development we’ve made a decision to drop support for IE6 and IE7. So currently IE versions 8 to 11 are supported. In case of IE6 and IE7 Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer should still run, with minor glitches though which we are not planning to fix. Luckily, after a bunch of devbuilds we are now ready for a public release.

In this release we’ve resolved a wide range of issues. While you can look up the full list of issued fixed in our issue tracker, the most important changes are:

Full support of Enhanced Protected Mode
Acceptable Ads are now supported
Improved installer. Made it multilingual. And it will now be able to detect if IE is opened and close if needed.
Fixed incorrect blocking of videos on a wide range of websites
Fixed a lot of stability issues
Fixed incorrect blocking of non-ad content
ABP should not be triggering “Only secure content is displayed” warning message anymore

It is worth mentioning that there are also a few known issues we still need to tackle, most important being “ads on Google Search sometimes aren’t hidden”. This issue can be reproduced no matter whether Acceptable Ads are enabled or disabled, so it may cause some confusion which is why we are planning to fix it ASAP (in the next few weeks).