Adblock for Internet Explorer is not an option · 2007-08-29 13:59 by Wladimir Palant
I already answered that question several times but recently a few people asked me again to create an Adblock Plus version for Internet Explorer. So I thought it would be worth answering in detail in my blog. Fact is, this is extremely unlikely to happen, for various reasons.
Internet Explorer is very different from Firefox. Firefox is extensible, this is one of its very basic features. You can write extensions in XUL and JavaScript, this does not only allow extensions to be built fast but also makes sure that you can change virtually anything the browser does. Internet Explorer on the other hand requires binary plugins meaning that you have to use a compiled language like C++, this already increases the development effort by factor 10 at the very least (that’s the main reason why there are only few really free Internet Explorer extensions). Furthermore, these extensions can only communicate with the browser through predefined interfaces. “New toolbar? Great! Context menu item? Should be doable. Checking everything the browser loads before the browser loads it? Why would you want that? Go build a local proxy server.”
This means that the effort of developing Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer would be very high, as well as nothing can be reused from the existing Adblock Plus for Firefox. Even after working full-time on it for a few months you would only get a rather poor copy — you just cannot have the same user-interface integration in Internet Explorer. And, personally, I don’t see any gain from supporting such an outdated browser. I switched to Mozilla four years ago and never looked back. Here in Germany Internet Explorer is steadily moving into a position of a minority browser — with a good reason.
Of course there are ad blocking solutions for Internet Explorer. But most don’t have a real user interface, you can only use predefined lists and cannot add your own filters (or it is complicated). Some people tried to create Adblock Plus clones — with large effort and less convincing results. But I am not going to waste my time on that.
lulz · 2007-08-30 14:19 · #
Man adblock is great, but you need to work on a spam filter to stop people like him ;)
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
A spam filter cannot stop comments submitted manually. But I can always correct this ;)
Tim · 2007-08-30 14:26 · #
{clap} {clap}
well said Wladimir, thanks for making it so clear. It doesn’t make any difference to me (obviously) as I’m on sunny Debian.
The only adblocking thing I ever saw for IE was from sunbelt kerio personal firewall. What it did was post a javascript into every page one visited which atempted to stop all popups and block all ads. as you pointed out, extending it would have been impossible, mainly because it was proprietry, and also because javascript has some limits and writing extensions in javascript is not ideal (though i hear one does that in opera)
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
There are certainly more sophisticated solutions. Most ad blockers act as a local proxy and cut out anything matching a filter. This works most of the time but there are many issues – e.g. they tend to break sites using XHTML (by cutting out something they make the webpage use invalid XML, the browser displays an error message then).
Simon · 2007-08-30 16:41 · #
> Furthermore, these extensions can only communicate with the browser through predefined interfaces.
Well, technically you could always ignore the interfaces and use core Win32 window/message hooks and subclassing to achieve interactions not available through the API. If you so want, IE’s API corresponds to Gecko’s XPCOM API, whereas the rest corresponds to XUL hacking…
Anyway, an acceptable and quite easy-to-use adblock solution for IE7 (and IE6) is contained in the Über-package IE7pro, which does what Adblock Plus, Tab Mix Plus, Mouse Gestures, Super DragAndGo, Proxy Switcher, User Agent Switcher, etc. do for Firefox.
See http://ie7pro.com/ad-blocker.html for screenshots.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
You cannot write an extension with hooks – this is something for one tiny hack, maybe two, but if your entire program relies on that you will find yourself in trouble very soon. Redefining/extending any of Firefox’s JavaScript functions on the other hand is pretty trivial. Extending XPCOM components is a little more trouble but is still easy enough.
Some One · 2007-08-30 22:41 · #
People still use IE, Oh man
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
So what?
Simon · 2007-08-30 22:58 · #
> You cannot write an extension with hooks
Sure you can. It will of course be neither easy nor pretty, but there should be no technical limitation why you couldn’t. I agree that developing for Firefox is far easier (not having to compile anything and having the sources handy really helps – also to attract new developers), but you seem to be looking for a categoric difference between Firefox and IE which IMO doesn’t exist.
OTOH the main point of my previous post was that Adblock Plus isn’t really required for IE because a similarly capable extension already exists (though currently without a choice of filter subscriptions) – so just point people there and continue developing on your platform of choice.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I wasn’t speaking about technical limitations. You can always hack something together. If nothing else works, you can patch IE code on the fly. Some third-party security patches for IE actually did that. But this is not a maintainable solution, adding features and making changes will be extremely difficult. And each IE update is likely to break what you have done. So while this is technically possible, the effort required is much too high.
As to IE7Pro – I didn’t try it yet so that I cannot tell whether it is in any way comparable to Adblock Plus. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can download the source code anywhere.
AM088 · 2007-08-31 04:46 · #
Will you consider adblock plus for Konqueror? :P
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Nope :)
I can only consider Gecko-based browsers.
Wally B · 2007-09-01 18:52 · #
Why in the world would anyone want to make any sort of add blocker for IE? making any kind of extension or add-on only encourages people to use it…
Richard Lovaas · 2007-09-03 04:34 · #
I recently downloaded Adblock Plus and SelectView. I still
get the same number of ads, including the New York Times, where I just now read about the response to Adblock.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Adblock Plus doesn’t block anything by default. If you don’t want to add you filters – add one of the filter subscriptions from http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
Jackson · 2007-09-03 07:02 · #
There are many ad filtering and blocking programs for IE already, though most are not free. Before I switched to FF, maybe 18 months ago, I used to use a program called Filtergate (http://www.filtergate.com/). Of course, being filter driven, the filters had to be updated regularly. I think that Zone Alarm Suite also has IE ad blocking.
Wilhelm Steigel · 2007-09-04 02:37 · #
Wladimir:
I understand your AdBlock program and here are my comments
1. Are you a communist?
2. Are you a Microsoft employee or contractor or are they paying you?
3. How do you think companies like Google can make money with out ads? (may be you are thinking subscriptions so Microsoft can come and kill who ever is charging subscriptions)
4. Who do you think is going benefit from your AdBlock? – Microsoft.
5. I do not work for Google, Yahoo, Ask or any other companies…
6. Just go ahead and put a blanket on Autobahn and sleep on it for 15 minutes.
Wil
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
lol
1. No
2. No
3. No
4. No – Google is the first to benefit, see http://adblockplus.org/blog/mozilla-hurting-google-by-recommending-adblock-plus. Why should Microsoft benefit from it?
5. Ok, neither do I
6. Thank you, you are very friendly
ptc · 2007-09-04 10:17 · #
It is definitely a great tool. If a user wants to block ads then then there is problem with the advertisement. People are crying out about failing of a business model with this move but if user-comfort fails a business model then there is problem with that business model design; it is not win-win for everyone and so is destined to fail.
Great work! Keep the good work up!!
ultravioletu · 2007-09-04 15:15 · #
Wilhelm:
I understand your questions and here are my comments:
1. Are you a communist? Or perhaps an Ostie?
2. Are you a Google employee or contractor or are they paying you?
3. How do you think a company like Google can get hurt by Adblock?
4. Who do you think is going to benefit from killing AdBlock? Shorely not Google?
5. Do I work for Google, Yahoo, Ask or any other companies??
6. Welche Autobahn?
:) uv
atlas · 2007-09-04 16:49 · #
I read in the NYTimes article it is possible to customize Adblock Plus to allow google ads, and eliminate everything else.
What is that procedure? (I am not a programmer-type so I hope it is relatively easy)
Thanks for the great work!!
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
See my reply in http://adblockplus.org/blog/mozilla-hurting-google-by-recommending-adblock-plus#c000651
TruthSeeker · 2007-09-05 04:10 · #
Who the heck needs an adblocker creeated for Internet Explorer when Norton Internet Security has had one built into it for years? And it works extremely well! Sure I’d like to have another option but if the open-source nuts don’t want to work with IE, that’s just fine.
S.Woods · 2007-09-05 05:14 · #
Idealogy has little to do with it in most cases, its the fact that open source allows more options and often leads to better programs that people use OSS. Linus Torvalds isn’t some kind of communist.
Adblock Plus simply put in combination with Flashblock can rid you of every advertisement there is (although I personally don’t), if you want to pay Norton with all the viruses targeting their software to do something that you can get for free elsewhere go ahead and do that..most of us though are smarter with our money.
JohnD · 2007-09-07 21:33 · #
According to the Adblock Plus statistics, the 4 top sites with blocked advertisements had a total of over 57,000 ads blocked. Adblock Plus is apparently working well and anyone who suggests that I view 57,000 ads needs their blood alcohol level tested.
Sebeto · 2007-09-09 22:20 · #
Congratulations :)
These who want solution for Internet Explorer can build it if they can’t stop using their favorite Microsoft browser… :p
Dark Shroud · 2007-09-13 07:17 · #
Sebeto, there already is an Ad Blocker for IE, it’s called IE7 Pro. It’s been mentioned a few times already. And guess what, it works very well and adds a few other features to IE as well.
That being said I rather like Ad Block Plus, I use it in Sea Monkey. It’s one of three plug-ins I have/need. Keep up the good work. :)
CeeJay · 2007-09-25 09:36 · #
Users that have no other option than to use Internet Explorer can use PowerIE to block ads and popups.
http://www.powerie.com/
It haven’t been updated in years but still works for the majority of ads on the net, and it’s far better than browsing without an ad-filter.
It also work fine with all versions of IE , even IE 7.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I wonder, who are the users who “have no other option than to use Internet Explorer”? There are corporate users of course who are not allowed to install anything on their computers – but those will not be able to install plugins for Internet Explorer either. Everybody else has the option to install a modern browser.
CeeJay · 2007-09-25 16:12 · #
Yes , they could be corporate users , but they could also be private users whose ISP only allows internet access through a login system that requires a special Internet Explorer plugin (It sounds horrible and it is, but I have encountered this in the past)
Could also be inexperienced users who are scared to use anything other than “what they use at work” or “learned to use first” , or “official microsoft programs” (Some people seem to have the misguided notion that if Microsoft made it, it must be good because they made the OS it runs on)
Some people won’t use anything but IE because they use an online banking system or something similar that only supports IE.
My aunt uses IE because it runs better on her very old and severely memory limited computer.
My poing is that if you can’t/won’t use Adblock Plus there are other alternatives.
I use Firefox & Adblock Plus myself – no need to convince me.
ie-fans · 2007-09-29 11:02 · #
Internet Explorer works faster than firefox, and eats less money, It is much ridiculious if security is an issue, many e-bank support ie exclusively. So I choose Internet Explorer.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I hope you don’t mind if I don’t even try to argue with you? I didn’t understand any of your arguments, maybe I am just too stupid for your wisdom.
Ryan · 2007-11-14 05:19 · #
I think that there should be a better skin for this website. Maybe more people would download AdBlock then and then switch to FF :D.
Pretty great idea, eh?/ :)
Huwyngr · 2007-11-27 17:29 · #
<< TruthSeeker · 2007-09-05 05:10 · #
Who the heck needs an adblocker creeated for Internet Explorer when Norton Internet Security has had one built into it for years? And it works extremely well! ..... >>
—————————
Unfortunately Symantec took it out of NIS 2008’s add-on although I believe it may still be in N360. However I have heard from a reliable source that they are going to put it back in with a free update in the next month or two.
I hope so since IE7Pro does not filter effectively on Compuserve’s new setup and some of us use IE7 because we are doing on-line support work for computer users!
Marc Kupper · 2008-03-17 19:26 · #
Given that you started out “I already answered that question several times but recently a few people asked me again” this should be in the FAQ as that’s where I looked first and I then found this page via Google.
Joshua · 2008-07-29 19:27 · #
Thanks for clearing this up. I really wanted this to be more possible than it is, but I understand the reasons. I still am forced to used IE every once in a while, due to a few things I need that, unfortunately, only IE does. For my work, I end up browseing through a LOT of.aspx web pages (Sharepoint pages using the asp framework). These render poorly to not-at-all in Firefox and usually not-at-all in Opera. So (and I realize I’m getting off topic) do you see support for asp in the future for Firefox. Would extensions have the capacity to accomplish this or would it require a more fundamental reworking of Firefox? Thanks.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
ASP is a server-side technology, for the browser it looks like just any other HTML page. So no explicit support for ASP is required. Problem is that these HTML pages have been coded for Internet Explorer, relying on Internet Explorer bugs or using proprietary Internet Explorer features. So the issue won’t go away unless the web sites you are using are fixed. Feel free to complain to whoever is maintaining those, with sufficiently many complains they will hopefully do something.
Mack · 2008-08-10 08:56 · #
I have used adblock in my FF browser and can only offer praise for how the product works; however, I have to be honest and say that I don’t find you much different from M$ in your attempt to control what software people should use. (ie: if you don’t want ads, don’t use IE) I would remind you that your product reaches outside Germany’s borders and that most people prefer to make their own choices, sometimes despite expert opinions.
Note that I generally do not use IE7, but find that anyone who sounds like an acolyte tends to irritate me. (When pushing their opinions on others.) This is how your blog entry comes across. <<also, I have to admit that after Googling ‘adblock for internet explorer’ I was annoyed that this is the only legitimate link found, but that’s obviously not your fault :-D >>
I understand and respect your technical reasons for not writing this code but think you should have left your explanation at that.
Otherwise, thanks for writing such a great piece of code!
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Sorry about irritating you – but I don’t see what I said that isn’t obvious. IE6 has been released in 2001, IE7 is a version with only minor changes (if you look at the engine). Maybe when IE8 comes out it will be possible to take this browser seriously again. But so far, Internet Explorer is a hazard for the web, and I don’t see why I should invest my time into it.
Bruce G. · 2008-08-11 21:26 · #
I don’t want to take any camps here (btw, I never understood camps, I just use what is convenient to me, Windows, OS X, Linux, IRIX, I have them all), but there is a stand-alone and FREE and OPEN SOURCE extension for IE6 and IE7 and it is called IE adblock and both the EXE and the SOURCE code can be downloaded from here: http://www.catenalogic.com/products/ieadblock/Download.aspx
It works quite well, thought not 100%, it is especially bad on flash ads, but it does work, it is small, stand-alone and free. The source code is freely available, and the company is actually encouraging the community to take it an further develop it in any way. So much for developing for IE being hard and not for free :)
Another thing I don’t understand is Microsoft bashing. MS is just another business, like Apple, IBM, SUN, or anyone else, they are in there to make money, and as much as possible of it. Any other company would act EXACTLY like MS if they were in their place, they would be retarded not to.
As to people asking who is still using IE, just check the W3counters report for July 2008, 61% of the web are using IE, while gecko-based browsers (all of them together) are oscillating in the mid to high 20s in the last few years, and this trend doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I don’t do any MS bashing. I use Windows XP because it is a good operating system. I don’t use Internet Explorer because it is a crappy browser. And I really don’t care what the majority of the web is using – most people use what comes with their OS. After having been on the web development side of things for a while I learned to understand that the smaller the number of people using IE, the better for the web. Fortunately, all statistics show that Firefox is slowly gaining market share – see for example http://www.xitimonitor.com/en-us/browsers-barometer/firefox-march-2008/index-1-2-3-127.html
Thank you for the link to that software, I never heard about it before. The source code is roughly the same size as for Adblock Plus (depending on what you count as source code, and excluding third-party code) while offering barely any functionality. Notable is that this application will only hide ads when the page finishes loading (that’s where Adblock was five years ago) and that is offers effectively no user interface integration – so you cannot add filters by right-clicking an ad and you cannot see the list of all that can be blocked on the current page. Also notable that it uses a series of heuristics to determine what can be hidden. These heuristics will entirely fail for background images or things like behaviors (comparable to XBL in Gecko browsers). And while it is handling scripts, removing scripts after page load is pointless.
So I would say that this is exactly what my post was about. You disagree?
Bruce G. · 2008-08-12 20:33 · #
No Wlad, I don’t disagree. My post was merely an answer to the title of this blog page: Adblock for IE is not an option. Well it seems like it is an option after all. Yes, I agree with all your comments, it is in an early stage of development, and not much has been done on it after the initial release (the authors admitted they don’t have the time to work on it, that’s why they released it as an open source), but it is a starting point.
The biggest hurdle in all programming projects is usually starting from scratch, but here we already have some code that works (to some success), and which can be freely modified and extended and made better.
Of course I don’t expect you to do it, you’ve already done enough, but I just wanted to spread the word. Adblock Plus is the first plugin I install after installing Firefox, and I was overjoyed when I saw that there is a Safari Adblock, so now all that is missing is a similar thing for IE. I know there are alternatives mentioned above, but they are all bundles, which I dislike, just a discrete small ad-blocking plugin is all I need, I don’t need the extra features.
Btw some time (year) ago I realized that Adblock and Adblock plus are two different plugins, from two different developers. How come? Is there a plan to merge them? Or is there nothing to be gained by it?
Also, I did not accuse you of MS bashing, it was pointed to the comments by some people above. ‘Some’ people just enjoy it so much, they don’t even stop to think if it makes sense.
As for the IE dominance of the web, it is a fact, and it will be for the foreseeable time. Yes, Europe is more open minded (I was born in Europe :) but North America has a lion’s share of the global market, and here people will pretty much always use what comes with the OS. We can either call those people names and ignore them, or, the better way, do something about making those OS bundled browsers better and more secure. Just my 2c :)
cheers,
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
The Adblock vs. Adblock Plus story is rather complicated: http://adblockplus.org/en/history. I would love to merge both projects to avoid further confusion but Adblock’s project maintainer won’t let me (despite the project being abandoned).
Main problem with this IE Adblock (and probably with most other Adblock clones for non-Gecko browsers) is that it isn’t really blocking anything. It waits for the page to load and starts looking through it then, trying to find something that can be removed. This is not a good approach – it is neither saving time nor traffic, you are not guaranteed to find everything you might want to block, you are not protected from malware in ads, and you “hang” the browser for a while whenever a page loads. These are all issues that Adblock Plus doesn’t have thanks to content policies mechanism in Gecko. But in Internet Explorer you would need to build a local proxy server for that (as mentioned in the article), handle SSL somehow without triggering certificate errors and try to match requests arriving at your proxy to elements on the page the user is viewing to make blocking easy. These are all very hard problems, and the existing code doesn’t help solving them.
Ben · 2008-08-14 17:38 · #
I was just reading your last blog regarding AdBlock Plus, however, i will have to disagree with you, i know you dont’ want to hear this however, you can’t as programmer focus on one browser, i mean you could, however, that would be such a great promotional gain for you. Just think about it, you have a great and fantastic AdBlock Plus for FireFox, i think it’s awesome!!!
But just think about it for a minute, if you take the time and develop one for IE, and make it work, do your best and then charge a norminal fee for it, for your time and effort, i know i would pay for it. I love firefox and also IE, even with firefox advantages over IE, there are still some things that won’t work in firefox, for instance, i can’t browse my bank website with firefox, when i try to login, i get problems, their website is requiring IE over firefox.
However, you see my point right, just develop the program, give it a good shot and see the outcome, i mean you never know.. if you dont’ gain from it you can always scrap it.
It’s the old saying be above the rest.
Thanks,
BG
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I hope you already complained at your bank?
As a programmer with limited time, I can and I should focus on one browser, namely the one where I can develop something very useful with that limited time. I could probably develop something of similar quality for Internet Explorer – assuming I would get 10 times more time to work on it. So, given that I already put 2 years of development time into Adblock Plus, in around 20 years I would have something usable for Internet Explorer. Unless of course somebody is willing to pay me full-time to work on that (despite near zero chances for return on investment).
Ben · 2008-08-15 16:42 · #
Crazy thing is when i complain to them about that issue, their reply was sorry, the site is best viewed by IE, from that, i just said whatevs, move along.
However, you do have a good point, most people would probably see that AdBlock Plus is free for FireFox and completely ignor the IE version which would have taken you much time and effort to build.
Thanks for your reply,
BG
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Heh, you have to love outsourced support – the guy who answered you probably didn’t have any idea about the banking application and just quoted the “minimal requirements”.
James · 2008-08-19 07:41 · #
I’m working on an IE adblock program and all the author’s comments are true.
Why continue? I believe there’s a good market for an IE solution.
Hell, I’m half making this for myself.
Gireesh · 2008-08-29 05:29 · #
For the person enquiring about konqueror, it can import the filters from the adblock plus project. It works quite well. Download the file http://easylist.adblockplus.org/adblock_rick752.txt and then in Konqueror settings enable adblock and point it to the txt file.
Leetie · 2008-09-02 19:28 · #
I found this page searching for “adblock for IE” :)
Just wanted to say thanks for creating adblock for FF. It is awesome.
Amit · 2008-09-03 00:33 · #
Firefox to me is nothing without Adblock and NoScript. Thanks a ton.
Does Google Chrome get your blessings? It is an open source but does it mean, it is ok with addons and extensions? Are you planning to support this new browser?
Thanks for great work,
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
No, open source has nothing to do with it. Gecko browser engine is built with extensions in mind, and it also has a nice mechanism for blocking content that ad blockers can use. From all I know, WebKit has none of it, so the situation isn’t much different from Internet Explorer. Maybe one of the Safari ad blockers can be ported.
ac · 2008-09-03 07:41 · #
If your objective isn’t to block every ad on earth, just most of them, being able to block or replace requests to the ad serving companies ip networks and or domains should be enough. I estimate this takes around 1k lines of code and requires no proxy because you can instead hook the calls that open tcp connections locally in IE and look at the ip and/or request being made. Similar to using hosts files to resolve to local web server but with more flexibility than that.
Adding ad servers to the block list could be made by adding a context menu handler that writes the address to a memory mapped file or whatever.
JB · 2008-09-04 00:35 · #
This is a great website. Keep it up.
Carlos · 2008-09-12 02:14 · #
AdBlock Pro 2.6 [ Internet Explorer ]
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
And what exactly is this telling us? “Adblock Pro” has all the issues every ad blocker for Internet Explorer has…
Rebekah · 2008-09-14 02:14 · #
Man, I’d use Mozilla all the time if I could, but for some reason my shockwave won’t work for me on Mozilla, and so a lot of sites I like to use won’t work on it.
Thanks for your creation, it does wonders. But I can only pray one day something as clever as this will come out for IE.
Raghav · 2008-09-15 16:25 · #
Does this amazing thing work on Chroma. At times I feel Chroma was created only to counter AdBlock plus over Firefox. Trying to point to business interests.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
See http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20359#20359
Karl · 2008-09-30 16:14 · #
In addition to what you say (that is right) there is the fact that IE sucks and should not be used.
Les · 2008-10-12 20:56 · #
There is a product for Internet Explorer that is very similar to Adblock. It is called AdShield. Go to http://www.ad-shield.com/ to check it out.