Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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

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.

Tags: adblock plus releases

Comment [8]

pmuser · 2014-11-15 01:48 · #

Still no fix for Pale Moon. Very disappointing. If you aren’t going to do anything for us, at least come out and say it.

https://issues.adblockplus.org/ticket/1331

And tell your cronies in the forum to show some respect.

https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24878&hilit=pale+moon

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

I have strong doubts that we can properly support Pale Moon – it is based on an outdated Firefox version with modern JavaScript features and new Firefox functionality only backported selectively. This means that the testing we do in Firefox is useless – we have to do additional (and rather extensive) testing in Pale Moon as well. And even then we’d have to keep work-arounds in place that we would rather remove. As things are now, Adblock Plus will likely be broken in Pale Moon with the very next release already as we plan to stop supporting outdated Firefox versions (e.g. in order to get rid of some Firefox-only JavaScript constructs).

Note that these are merely my conclusions based on the information in the ticket. So far I didn’t have time to look into it myself. However, “439 commits” (currently displayed in the Pale Moon source code repository) doesn’t exactly sound like Pale Moon is shortening the distance to current Firefox versions.
Indy · 2014-11-16 17:36 · #

Great response Wladimir.

Forks are great. Expecting plug-ins of forks to work, however, is silly. Don’t build a fork if you can’t stand the loss of functionality of the original product.

Firefox is a plug-in browser. It’s inconceivable that you would fork it without taking this major aspect of the browser into consideration.
James Edward Lewis II · 2014-11-17 03:53 · #

I think that the Pale Moon team should do what the developers of Light do: Branch off popular extensions that don’t work unmodified; then again, Light still tracks Firefox, so their task is easier.
redwolfe_98 · 2014-11-29 18:32 · #

i have had no issues with the new version, with FF 33.0.3..

as far as “palemoon” goes, if there are problems, maybe a simple solution would be to use an old version of “adblock plus”..
Mike Stride · 2014-11-29 21:51 · #

Hello from Wales, UK. I’ve just installed Linux Mint 17 KDE but found that the Adblock Plus that came with it, version 1.1.4, caused Firefox to lag pretty badly, so I removed it. Can you tell me if this latest version is worth a shot ? I’d mostly like to use it when watching longer video, documentaries etc on YouTube.

Best regards,

Mike

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

I assume that the Firefox version you’ve got there is similarly outdated? Please give a current Firefox with a current Adblock Plus version a try – things have changed a lot in the past four years.

Note that Adblock Plus still has a performance impact under some conditions, this isn’t something most people will notice however.
Mike Stride · 2014-12-01 00:25 · #

Thanks for the prompt reply Wladimir. I have Firefox 3.0 and went ahead with the latest 2.6.6 version of Adblock Plus. It’s working brilliantly. Linux Mint 17 KDE is pretty recent, so I was surprised that its preloaded Adblock was such an old version. I’m very happy with this new issue though and as you say, it has practically no ill effects on the speed my browser reacts.

Regards from Wales,

Mike.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

They are using the latest Adblock Plus version that still works with Firefox 3.0, Adblock Plus 2.6.6 definitely doesn’t…
Mike Stride · 2014-12-01 12:55 · #

Wladimir, version 2.6.6 most definitely does work for me with Firefox 3.0 on Linux Mint 17 KDE. I checked a moment ago that a different version wasn’t installed by default, if indeed such a thing can occur. I watched a lot of YouTube videos last night without a solitary advert appearing.
filbert · 2014-12-09 23:36 · #

Although Mozilla’s page says 2.6.6 is compatible with Firefox 22 and later, it’s not working for me with the Firefox (Iceweasel) 31.3.0 ESR in Debian Wheezy’s repository.

After I updated to 2.6.6, all my filters were gone, and new filters weren’t remembered over browser restarts.

After some other efforts, I tried installing ABP2.6.6 as the first action on a completely default profile and it still was unable to save or restore filters between restarts or via creating and loading a backup manually.

After checking the release history, I downgraded to ABP2.6.5, and it could now read the test filters I’d saved with ABP2.6.6.

Maybe Debian changed something; I haven’t had the opportunity to build the un-rebranded FF31.3.0 yet and test on that.

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