Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Typo correction feature removed · 2013-07-03 15:39 by Wladimir Palant

In November last year we started an experiment with the typo correction feature in Adblock Plus for Firefox. Now we removed that feature again, it’s already gone in the development builds and won’t be part of the next release. We will continue to maintain the URL Fixer extension however, anybody wanting that feature back can install it.

Was it a bad feature?

No, some of the feedback we’ve got indicates that it wasn’t, it was actually pretty useful. It was also a nice experiment in doing monetization that doesn’t affect the user (the original announcement explains the monetization approach).

So why remove it now?

Unfortunately, there are lots of misconceptions about how this feature works:

• People frequently think that it is a blacklist that we maintain. In fact, it’s a whitelist approach — we provide an initial list with popular domains, users can extend it with the websites they visit. All addresses entered into the address bar are checked for similarities with entries on the whitelist.
• The opt-in message is frequently misunderstood, people don’t understand how typo correction can help them avoid malware sites. What’s worse, the message is occasionally misread as a claim that the domain they typed in is malicious.
• The monetization component isn’t communicated in the user interface, so people learning about it from third parties tend to believe bogus claims about how it works. Obviously, we are an open source project and in theory anybody could go to the source code and refute these claims — but the algorithms are complicated enough that most people cannot.

It’s everything but trivial to resolve any of these issues, with the minimalistic user interface of the typo correction feature making that job particularly hard (it’s designed to work the same in the desktop and mobile versions of Firefox).

There are also other issues. For example, there is little chance of typo correction ever working across all Adblock Plus variants (from all I know, it’s technically impossible to implement this feature in Chrome, Opera or Android). And managing the unavoidable false positives creates a significant manual effort on our end.

All in all, this feature has its issues, apparently too many to have it used by so many people.

Tags: adblock plus

Comment [6]

1. THOMASSIN Dominique · 2013-07-08 13:00 · #

   Hello M. PALANT,

   why is the ABP in Firefox not the same than Chrome, so much easier to use.
   Thanks for the answer

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   That’s because we are still working on a simpler user interface that will be part of both Firefox and Chrome. The new first-run page is the first step, it’s now identical in Firefox and Chrome.

2. Anonymous · 2013-07-13 00:53 · #

   Thank you very much for removing typo “correction” and leaving it as a separate extension.

3. Anonymous · 2013-07-13 00:56 · #

   Maintaining this as a separate extension makes so much more sense; it never really fit with Adblock Plus in the first place.

4. Franco · 2013-07-22 07:31 · #

   Desde Argentina, quiero felicitar a la organización ABP, me parece perfecto que aya alguien controlando el abuso de las publicidades en Internet y mas de la manera en que ustedes lo hacen. Me pregunto ¿Seria posible que esta “EXTENCIÓN” este de manera predeterminada en todos los navegadores del mundo? Yo prometo instalar esta aplicación en todas las computadoras que estén en mi haber, y recomendar esta organización. Felicitaciones son increíbles y se merecen el éxito.
   Franco A.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Hi Franco, I’m not sure whether you are expecting a reply from me – but your comment has nothing to do with the blog post you commented on which is why I’ll remove it. Anyway, it’s great that you like Adblock Plus.

5. HaRT · 2013-07-22 18:17 · #

   Dear Wladimir Palant,
   Since the typo fixing feature has been isolated in «URL Fixer», please come see the dedicated «URL Fixer discussion» topic at http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=79027#p79027 (the extension’s official support site, as per http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/url-fixer/).

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   I replied in the forum topic. Removing the off-topic comment here, as usually.

6. Bridge Alison · 2013-07-25 12:21 · #

   Torpor is right HTTPS protects visitors of a website. It does not protect the website against DoS attacks, at least I concur with his

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   You wrote this comment on the wrong blog post, I’ll remove it.

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