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Getting started with Adblock Plus

What is Adblock Plus? What can it do?
Installing Adblock Plus
First steps
- Choosing a filter subscription
- Disabling Adblock Plus on frequently used sites
Solving problems
- What if Adblock Plus blocks too much?
- What if Adblock Plus doesn't block an advertisement?
Uninstalling Adblock Plus

What is Adblock Plus? What can it do?

Adblock Plus is an extension for Firefox, Thunderbird, and several other applications with the primary goal of removing advertisements. For that, it will look at all requests made by web pages and block the request if the address the request should go to matches a filter in Adblock Plus. Out of the box, Adblock Plus comes without any filters whatsoever but will offer to add a filter subscription on first start — that is a list of filters maintained by other Adblock Plus users and will be updated automatically regularly. A filter subscription can be added later as well (see Choosing a filter subscription), but you can also create your own filters regardless of whether you use a filter subscription.

Blocking requests is limited to removing advertisements that are technically not part of the web page but downloaded separately. Because of that limitation, there is also an additional mechanism called "element hiding" which allows hiding parts of web pages based on some unique properties. The disadvantage here is that even hidden elements are still downloaded and require processing time in the browser. Also, creating element hiding rules is more complicated because you have to select the right set of properties — only the elements that need to be hidden should have those, not the required page content. Element Hiding Helper extension makes this task easier, yet creating good element hiding rules still requires much experimenting.

Installing Adblock Plus

Go to the Adblock Plus page on addons.mozilla.org and click the big green installation button. Confirm installation and restart the application when asked.

Alternatively, you can install from the installation page on this site. In addition to the usual multi-language build, this page also offers you the smaller Adblock Plus builds for one language only. However, you will need to allow installation from adblockplus.org.

Additional information:

First steps

Choosing a filter subscription

Adblock Plus "by itself" doesn't do anything. It can see everything a web page attempts to load but it doesn't know whether this attempt should be blocked. And that's what you need filters for — filters will tell Adblock Plus what should be blocked. Usually, you won't create filters yourself, instead you will add a filter subscription that is maintained by somebody else.

Which filter subscription should you choose? Adblock Plus offers you a few selected filter subscriptions on first start. The full list is much longer. However, you should not add all subscriptions you can get — each filter subscription contains filters that will in some cases block something that is not an advertisement, this is unavoidable. Usually, this will never be an issue for you, but you will be far more likely to hit this problem if you add too many filter subscriptions. As a rule of thumb, you should not use filter subscriptions with overlapping competencies. For example, using EasyList (mainly targeted at English-language sites) with an EasyList supplement for your region (like RuAdList for Russian sites) is fine. However, Fanboy's List (another list with main focus on English-language sites) shouldn't be used in combination with EasyList.

You can always change the filter subscriptions that you use by opening Adblock Plus preferences (press Ctrl+Shift+E). You can remove any filter subscriptions you have in that list, and you can add a new subscription by going to menu Filters / Add filter subscription. Once you are done with your changes click OK.

Disabling Adblock Plus on frequently used sites

Many web sites depend on advertising income, and if you visit a web site frequently you might want to allow their advertising — provided that this advertising isn't too annoying. To do that, navigate to that site and click the arrow symbol next to the Adblock Plus icon in toolbar. From the menu you can choose "Disable on ..." (you can undo that choice in the same way by unchecking this menu line).

Solving problems

What if Adblock Plus blocks too much?

It might happen that Adblock Plus prevents some site from functioning correctly. Usually, this is not a bug in Adblock Plus but a problem with the filters (or filter subscription) you are using, these filters tell Adblock Plus to block something that shouldn't be blocked. You verify this by temporarily disabling Adblock Plus, if this "fixes" the problem you are dealing with a bad filter. Please report bad filters by using "Report issue on this webpage" feature that will automatically collect important data of the current web page:

When asked about issue type, please choose "Adblock Plus is blocking too much":

Your report will be automatically sent to the maintainers of the filter list that you use. Please have understanding that filter maintainers don't reply to or act upon each of the many reports they receive. Your report will be more likely to be considered if you provide additional information to make the problem more obvious and reproducible.

What if Adblock Plus doesn't block an advertisement?

If you found an advertisement that Adblock Plus doesn't block, please check first whether you are using the right filter subscription. For example, expecting a French filter subscription to block advertisements on a Bulgarian website is unrealistic — you should add a Bulgarian filter subscription for that job. If the filter subscription is right, then the subscription maintainer is probably simply unaware of the problem and you should tell him by using "Report issue on this webpage" feature that will automatically collect important data of the current web page:

When asked about issue type, please choose "Adblock Plus doesn't block an advertisement":

Uninstalling Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus is uninstalled just like any other extension. You go to the Add-ons Manager, switch to Extensions, find Adblock Plus in the list and click the "Remove" button. More detailed instructions

Note that Adblock Plus preferences are not removed when the extension is uninstalled. If you reinstall Adblock Plus later your configuration will be available again. If you want a clean start with Adblock Plus you should remove the directory "adblockplus" in your user profile (how to find your profile). Also, you should go to about:config and reset all preferences starting with "extensions.adblockplus" (to reset right-click a preference and choose Reset from the context menu).