Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 3.4 for Chrome, Firefox and Opera released · 2018-10-31 02:00 by Thomas Greiner

Install Adblock Plus 3.4 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 3.4 for Firefox
Install Adblock Plus 3.4 for Opera

This release includes user interface improvements as well as a further reduction of the overall memory usage.

Changes

• Redesigned the first-run page (issue 6749).
• Redesigned the icon popup (issues 6794, 6801, 6816 and 6922).
• Polished the design of the issue reporter and begun including a screenshot with each report (issues 6751, 6795, 6827, 6828 and 6895).
• Made the following improvements to the settings page:
  • Added the “Show number of ads blocked in icon” option (issue 6740).
  • Started showing the “Show useful notifications” option regardless of whether the user has seen a notification previously (issue 6736).
  • Tooltips are shown on click now (issue 6758).
  • Removed the title input field when adding a filter list (issue 6760).
  • Removed the “NEW” label from Acceptable Ads without third-party tracking (issue 6768).
• Snippet filters are now required to be restricted to at least one domain (issues 6797 and 6846).
• Started logging snippet filter hits in our developer tools panel (issue 6843).
• Removed support for legacy :-abp-properties() syntax (issue 6870).
• Special comments are now required to be given at the top of filter lists (issue 6923).
• Added the EasyList Portuguese filter list (issue 6944).
• Added the new dir-string snippet to simulate logging in the developer tools console (issue 6964).
• Reduced the initial memory footprint by ~16% (issue 6916), base memory usage by ~28% (issues 6815, 6916), and memory used per frame by ~660 KB (issue 6967).
• Fixed: Layout shifted after opening dialog for adding new filter list on the settings page (issue 5851).
• Fixed: Blank values for snippet arguments were ignored (issue 6811).
• Fixed: Sometimes all subscriptions were listed as additional subscriptions (issue 6838).
• Fixed: $rewrite filters using wildcards didn’t match end of URL (issue 6868).
• Fixed: $csp filters with blank value caused errors due to injection of an invalid header (issue 6871).
• Fixed: Element hiding emulation filters for the domain localhost were considered invalid (issue 6931).
• Fixed: Snippet filters were ignored if the user resubscribed to the ABP anti-circumvention filter list (issue 6974).

Firefox-only changes

• Reverted to using inline styles for element hiding emulation filters (issue 6504).
• Ported the hide-if-contains-and-matches-style snippet (issue 6938).

Tags: adblock plus adblock plus chrome

Comment [3]

1. Les · 2018-10-31 23:33 · #

   Just updated I guess (10/31/18), and now have to refresh to make changes from on to off? Used to be able to turn off to load certain pages, then turn back on once loaded. Now, it does not work at all. If you refresh the page with it on, after loading it with abp off, it detects and will not reload the page.

   Reply from Thomas Greiner:

   Does this also occur on other websites and/or using a different browser? Because ad blocker detections that websites use are generally quite unreliable since they don’t detect ad blockers directly. Furthermore, they may not check for it again after reloading the page.

   If you can reliably reproduce this issue, it’d be great if you could report it at https://issues.adblockplus.org/ so that we can have a closer look at it.

   Update: The behavior as it was in the old version remains unchanged so en-/disabling the extension without clicking on "Refresh" should have the same effect as before. We are currently discussing how we can make it clearer that clicking on "Refresh" is not mandatory (see issue 7092) so we'd be happy to hear from anyone who wants to see this improved.

2. Dave Hawley · 2018-11-09 01:35 · #

   I suddenly found on Firefox 52.9 ESR on my old Windows XP machine that Facebook had become virtually unusable. Extremely slow and kept locking up, and Firefox kept popping up messages about unresponsive scripts. If the script was stopped all immediately returned to normal, but failed again on going to a new Facebook page.
   After a lot of head scratching, I discovered that ABP was the cause, and I’ve had to disable it on Facebook. The problem I’m sure started when ABP updated to 3.4 in the background without me being aware of it. My Windows 10 machine with Firefox 63 shows no such problems. Cheers, Dave.

   Reply from Thomas Greiner:

   Thanks for reporting the issue. We got another user who experiences a similar issue on Firefox and Windows XP but using Adblock Plus 3.3.

   Therefore our assumption is that this issue was not introduced with the latest update but is occurring due to an update Facebook made to its website that’s potentially related to circumventing ad blockers.

   We’re currently analyzing the situation and will make the necessary changes to resolve this issue.

3. Dave Hawley · 2018-11-09 15:36 · #

   Strange, as ABP 3.3 was released two or three months ago, and my problem hasn’t been happening anywhere near that long! I only noticed it in the last week or two in fact, which is why I assumed it started with 3.4.
   Glad to hear that it’s being addressed anyway!
   Cheers, Dave.

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