Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Adblock Plus 2.9.1 for Firefox released · 20 days ago by Wladimir Palant

Unfortunately, the Adblock Plus 2.9 release didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped for. Most importantly, the performance degradation caused by the new data storage turned out more severe than we expected, some users were experiencing regular noticeable browser hangs. While the performance of reading and saving Adblock Plus filters hasn’t improved yet, we turned off filter hit counts by default in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 as a first consequence to make sure the data no longer needs to be saved that often (issue 5298). Users who need this functionality can turn it back on by clicking the ABP icon, going into “Options” and checking “Count filter hits.” We will be looking into other ways to improve this, even though the main issue can only be resolved by the Firefox developers.

It also wasn’t noticed before release that the new data storage doesn’t work in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, so these users ended up with filters being reset on each restart. This has also been resolved in Adblock Plus 2.9.1 (issue 5279, issue 5285), the original data should show up again now. Some users are reporting similar issues in Firefox, a problem we couldn’t reproduce so far. If you are experiencing data loss on Firefox and are willing to let me debug the issue on your computer (via TeamViewer or a similar desktop sharing tool), please let me know in the comments below.

Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox released · 34 days ago by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.9 for Firefox

This release lays important groundwork for the Web Extensions migration. The way Adblock Plus stores its data has changed drastically, though for users everything should stay exactly the same (issue 5048). The new location of your filters and subscriptions is the browser-extension-data/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}/storage.js file in your Firefox profile, the same data will be used by the Adblock Plus build based on the Web Extensions platform once it is ready.

Additional changes

The hidden data_directory and please_kill_startup_performance preferences have been removed.
It is now possible to use { and } in CSS property filters (issue 4684).

Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.0 released · 35 days ago by Mario König

Install Adblock Plus for Samsung Internet 1.1.0

Changes

Added support for Nexus devices. (Issue 5192, Issue 5193)
Translated ABP for Samsung Internet Browser into Spanish, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Greek, Russian, French, Italian and Dutch. (Issue 4505, Issue 5232)
Added support for whitelisting websites. (Issue 4769)
Improved user experience by introducing the new Material theme. (Issue 4513)
Fixed multiple minor issues. (Issue 4522, Issue 4602, Issue 4772, Issue 4813, Issue 5100)

Please see this blog post for more details on the newly supported devices.

Adblock Browser 1.5.2 for iOS released · 57 days ago by Mario König

Install Adblock Browser 1.5.2 for iOS

Changes

Updated the version of Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera/Safari bundled with Adblock Browser to 1.12.4 (Issue 4554)
Introduced opt-in error reporting in order to improve stability (Issue 4672, Issue 4766)
Fixed popup issue on imgur.com (Issue 4164)
Fixed multiple issues which could potentially lead to crashes (Issue 4874, Issue 4908, Issue 4516)
Fixed multiple minor bugs (Issue 4904, Issue 5152, Issue 4703, Issue 4886, Issue 5029, Issue 5115, Issue 4480, Issue 5065)
Minor UI and usability improvements (Issue 4881, Issue 3653)

Element Hiding Helper 1.4 released · 76 days ago by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper

With this release Element Hiding Helper becomes fully compatible with multi-process Firefox (issue 2879). We also fixed a long-standing bug: “View source” command was only showing elements but no text nodes (issue 4588).

Adblock Plus 1.13.2 for Chrome and Opera released · 98 days ago by Jon Sonesen

Install Adblock Plus 1.13.2 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.13.2 for Opera

This is an emergency release, fixing a regression and preventing installation on unsupported Opera versions.

Changes

Fixed a regression with the “Hide targeted messages?” notifications, which prevented the notification text from being displayed (issue 5014).
Adblock Plus can no longer be installed on Opera 35 and older versions, which are incompatible (issue 4787).

Adblock Plus 1.13.1 for Chrome and Opera released · 102 days ago by Dave Barker

Install Adblock Plus 1.13.1 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.13.1 for Opera

This is an emergency release, fixing overly eager popup blocking.

Changes

Fixed a bug whereby popup windows containing iframes were sometimes blocked by mistake (issue 5009). While this was a pre-existing bug, it was made more serious by our recent popup blocking improvements (issue 4834).

Adblock Plus 1.13 for Chrome and Opera released · 104 days ago by Dave Barker

Install Adblock Plus 1.13 for Chrome
Install Adblock Plus 1.13 for Opera

This is a major release containing some user interface improvements and more changes behind the scenes.

Changes

Further improved our WebSocket (issue 4643, 4807) and popup (issue 4834) blocking capabilities.
Improved the “Block element” tool, fixing a bug where the dialog window would sometimes fail to open (issue 4714) and another which very rarely caused the currently targeted element(s) not to be highlighted (issue 4603).
Improved the “Add your own filters” interface in the Options page. Extremely large filters are now displayed properly (issue 1121), and the interface is much more responsive when dealing with large numbers of custom filters (issue 4752).
Improved the Adblock Plus developer tools pane. Chrome’s dark theme is now supported (issue 4136), the Control-F search interface now works (issue 4644) and elements hidden by CSS property filters are now listed (issue 3596).
Worked around a limitation with Chrome’s onCommitted event which caused many problems (issue 4598, 4599, 4647, 4804). Most notably this caused some requests to be improperly blocked / not blocked.

Adblock Plus 1.6 for Internet Explorer released · 175 days ago by Oleksandr Paraska

We are happy to announce the release of Adblock Plus 1.6 for Internet Explorer. This update brings a bunch of features, all of which you were able to try first in our latest development build.

As we have already pointed out in the development build announcement we are switching to CSS injection for element hiding, instead of a custom DOM traverser. This change was implemented for a more powerful element hiding.

The new way of element hiding through CSS injection will work only on IE10+. But since we support IE8+ we have also made improvements to the traverser itself and fixed other bugs, which should make the general ad blocking experience more robust.

We have also resolved a case where ABP for Internet Explorer would crash, so a more stable experience is also to be expected. You can see the full list of changes included in the release here.

Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox released · 217 days ago by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 2.8.2 for Firefox

This is a maintenance release, most importantly introducing some improvements to CSS property filters.

Additional changes

Made sure that element hiding rules don’t affect browser’s and extensions’ special pages, this regressed with Adblock Plus 2.8 (issue 4624, issue 4625).
Fixed blockable items list slowing down page loading (issue 4587).
Pop-ups using data: URLs and similar unusual schemes can be blocked now (issue 4368).
When selecting keyboard shortcuts, more shortcut keys already in use by the browser can be recognized. This will change the shortcut key to show Blockable items list from Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-V to Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-U for pretty much everybody (issue 4544).