The future of Element Hiding Helper · 2012-01-19 12:08 by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus roadmap currently has a bullet point “Integrate Element Hiding Helper into Adblock Plus”. After adding Page Inspector support to Element Hiding Helper today I think that I’m confident about what exactly will be integrated there.
Adblock Plus 2.0.3 released · 2012-01-05 09:54 by Wladimir Palant
- Added a way to disable automatic filter subscription updates by means of a hidden preference.
- Fixed: Blocking from context menu sometimes doesn’t work if the context menu has a submenu.
- Fixed: Tabs on Flash and Java sometimes disappear before they can be clicked.
- Filter Preferences: Fixed the default width of the “Enabled” column.
- Blockable items: Fixed “Disable filter on site” feature.
Adblock Plus 2.0.2 released · 2011-12-21 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
- Improved texts describing “non-intrusive ads” feature.
- Made toolbar icon properly customizable in Thunderbird.
- Fixed: Filter editing is broken in Firefox 3.6.
- Firefox Mobile: Fixed user interface to handle “non-intrusive ads” feature properly.
Adblock Plus 2.0.1 released · 2011-12-14 11:57 by Wladimir Palant
This release is fixing a few minor issues compared to Adblock Plus 2.0. Main reason for the release is a change to the compatibility information.
Adblock Plus 2.0 released · 2011-12-13 16:59 by Wladimir Palant
Major changes
- Experimental pop-up blocking support for the cases where the built-in pop-up blocker fails.
- New Filter Preferences dialog makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
- Custom filters can be organized into any number of filter groups.
- Backup and Restore functionality allows creating a copy of all filter preferences, not just custom filters.
- Added “Allow non-intrusive advertising” setting (can be changed in Filter Preferences, documentation).
Please welcome our first employee: Andrey Novikov · 2011-12-09 21:11 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I explained why we changed our policy on donations. This worked out and we were able to hire our first employee: Andrey Novikov. Andrey comes from a web development and server administration background, he is also the developer of the Androzic app for Android-based mobile phones. For now he is working on Adblock Plus for Chrome and already added proper recognition of third-party domains (something that only few people will notice but nevertheless important to bring our Chrome extension on par with the Firefox version). Next task on his list: porting user interface from Adblock Plus for Firefox to Chrome.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 4] · 2011-12-09 15:58 by Wladimir Palant
The previous part analyzed the last page of the survey where people replied on the role of Adblock Plus on the web. Of course, it would also be interesting to see whether the results are different depending on which group of survey respondents you look. I analyzed the last page for each of the survey languages separately and I’ve also created a separate analysis for “newbies” — people who said that they were using Firefox for less than one year. I’ll just publish the results here without commenting.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 3] · 2011-12-09 15:41 by Wladimir Palant
Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions, Adblock Plus functionality. Now we want to look at how people perceive the role of Adblock Plus on the web. This was the last page of the survey.
Release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.0 available · 2011-12-09 13:54 by Wladimir Palant
All the necessary changes are done and the development builds starting with Adblock Plus 2.0rc.3323 are release candidates for Adblock Plus 2.0. If everything goes well it will be released on Monday.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Adblock Plus options are now displayed directly on its page in Add-ons Manager (in Firefox 7 and above, in older versions the Options button opens toolbar icon’s menu).
- Changed the way the toolbar icon is being hidden, now it can always be brought back via toolbar customization.
- Status bar icon is no longer being displayed in Firefox version with add-on bar (there is no real status bar).
- List of blockable items can now be searched both by localized type name as well as by the corresponding filter option (forum topic).
- When recommended subscriptions are being added the language no longer becomes part of the subscription title.
- An “Adblock Plus” menu has been added to the classic Tools menu for reasons of keyboard accessibility, the Adblock Plus menu entry in the View menu has been removed.
- Added a warning if a subscription contains disabled filters (forum topic).
- Fixed: Don’t create new filter groups for filters being added if a user-defined group is already available (forum topic).
- Fixed: Using context menu prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
- Lots of polishing, especially on the new Filter Preferences dialog.
Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus · 2011-12-05 12:19 by Wladimir Palant
The development build last Friday introduced a new feature that took many people by surprise: Allowing acceptable ads. Sorry about that, I am usually trying to announce large functionality changes in a timely manner but that didn’t work this time. As of Adblock Plus 2.0b.3277 the current state is:
- “Allow non-intrusive advertising” option is enabled by default for all users but the ones using privacy filter lists (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy’s Tracking, Adverisity Privacy). The documentation explains why it has to be enabled by default.
- The first-run page notifies users about this change, opt-out works by clicking “Filter Preferences” and unchecking the option there.
- On the technical side, this option simply represents an additional filter subscription. The documentation describes how to view this filter subscription or disable the special treatment for it.
- There is a forum topic with lots of my replies to questions concerning this feature.
Other changes since the previous announcement:
- Filter search is now possible in the Filter Preferences.
- “Collapse blocked elements” option has been renamed into “Hide placeholders of blocked elements”.
- “Count filter hits” is now a visible option.
- Added “Reset hit statistics” filter action.
- Added warning for filter subscriptions requiring a newer Adblock Plus version.
- Updating all filter subscriptions is now possible using Ctrl-Shift-T keyboard shortcut (not visible in the user interface).
- Fixed: Filter groups should also have “Show/hide filters” in their Actions menu.
- Fixed: ABP menu still has the old “Preferences” menu item.
- Fixed: Dragging a filter subscription might display as a button or menu being dragged.