Adblock Plus

It has been suggested that Filterset.G be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since May 2012.

Adblock Plus

Developer(s)	Henrik Aasted Sørensen, Michael McDonald, Wladimir Palant
Stable release	2.0.3 / January 5, 2012; 4 months ago (2012-01-05)
Written in	JavaScript, XUL, CSS
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Mozilla extension, Google Chrome Extension
License	MPL
Website	adblockplus.org/

Adblock Plus (ABP) is a content-filtering and ad blocking extension for Mozilla Firefox (including Firefox for mobile^[1]), and Google Chrome web browsers. ABP, a forked version of Adblock, allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed. The ABP syntax is also supported by Midori through an extension.

Adblock Plus

How it works

Wikitravel with and without Adblock Plus

Like Mozilla's built-in image blocker, Adblock blocks HTTP requests according to their source address and can block iframes, scripts, and Flash. It also uses automatically generated user stylesheets to hide elements such as text ads on a page as they load instead of blocking them, known as element hiding.^[2]

History

Michael McDonald created Adblock Plus 0.5 that improved on Adblock by incorporating the following features:

• Whitelisting
• Support for blocking background images.
• Subscription to filters with a fixed address and automatically update them.
• The ability to hide HTML elements allowing a much greater range of images to be blocked.
• The ability to hide ads on a per site basis instead of globally.
• Memory leak fixes

McDonald discontinued development and transferred the name to Wladimir Palant, who released Adblock Plus 0.6 with a rewritten codebase in January 2006.^[3] PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007.^[4]

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome has been available since December 2010.^[5] The code for Adblock Plus for Google Chrome is largely based on the now renamed "AdThwart". The former developer of AdThwart is a contributor to the project.

Filters

Basic filter rules can include wildcards represented by asterisks (*). Sites and objects can be whitelisted with filters that start with two at signs (@@). Regular expressions delimited by slashes (/) can be used. Adblock Plus also supports a more-sophisticated syntax that gives fine-grain control over filters.^[6] An example of the sophisticated filtering would be 'wikipedia.org#div(id=siteNotice)', which will hide the siteNotice element used by Wikipedia to display donation requests.

Filter subscriptions

Users can add external filtersets. Adblock Plus includes the ability to use one or more external filter subscriptions that are automatically updated. Filterset.G is incompatible with this system (and Adblock Plus specifically recommends against using Filterset.G for other reasons as well), but other filtersets can be added by typing their addresses. A list of known Adblock Plus subscriptions is maintained on the Adblock Plus official website.

EasyList

EasyList^[7] is the most popular Adblock Plus filter list with over 12 million subscribers.^[8] Created by Rick Petnel,^[9] it became officially recommended by the Adblock Plus program, and filter lists for other languages were built on top of it. Petnel died in 2009^[10][11] and he named a user going by the name "Ares2" as the new maintainer.^[12]

Fanboy's lists

Fanboy's list is the second most popular Adblock Plus filter list. Fanboy started the service in early 2009. The lists available are Adblock List (Main list), Tracking List, and Annoyance Block List. The lists are available for Firefox, Iron-Chrome, IE, Opera and Midori.

Both EasyList and Fanboy's have had controversy over whitelisting tracking and advertising sites.^{[citation needed]}

ABP features improvements to the user interface, filter subscriptions, and an element hiding extension. It has since become the most popular extension for Firefox, with around 12 million daily users.^[13]

Although Adblock Plus does not support Internet Explorer, it is possible to export a filter list such as EasyList or Fanboy's List to an XML document which can then be imported into Internet Explorer's InPrivate content filtering.

Advert filtering controversy and "acceptable" ads

A number of website operators, who use online advertisements to fund the hosting of their websites, argue that the use of ad-blocking software such as Adblock risks cutting off their revenue stream. While some websites have successfully implemented subscription and membership based systems for revenue, the majority of websites today rely on online advertising to function.^[14] The assumption that users can visit a website for free, with advertisements to pay for the hosting, has led some operators to go as far as to call the use of Adblock tantamount to theft,^[15] and others to take counter-measures to prevent its use.

On December 5, 2011, Wladimir Palant announced that certain "acceptable" ads would be whitelisted in upcoming builds of the Adblock software, with the option to remove whitelisted ads via a custom setting in the software. According to Palant, only static advertisements with a maximum of one script will be permitted as "acceptable", with a preference towards text-only content. The announcement created some controversy both at Adblock's website and at social media sites like Reddit.^[16]

In response to the "acceptable ads" whitelisting more than one fork of Adblock Plus was created. Examples are Trueblock Plus^[17] and Adblock Lite.^[18] Both of these forks have no donation button. With regard to Trueblock, this is intentional as the author does not want credit for something he did not create. As to Adblock Lite, this is because of the user interface design, as the earlier versions of Adblock Plus did not have a donation button. Both these forks have (the reason for their existence) the option of the whitelisting disabled by default. The Adblock Lite version has the original interface restored. This means the latter does not have the allow-acceptable-ads-button, which thus can not be enabled.^[19]

Trueblock author Eric Bishop said, regarding the add-on, that its development will cease if Adblock Plus author Wladimir Palant decides to remove the controversial function.^[20] Furthermore, he speculated that the "acceptable" list could be used by Wladimir Palant to sell a spot to the highest bidder, making a profit by violating the trust given to the add-on, and as such, could be considered an ulterior motive. As of 18 March 2012, Trueblock is not available for Chrome.^[21]

Detection

Some webmasters have used JavaScript to detect the effects of the popular Adblock filters.^[22] This is done by generating a honeypot-like URL, verifying its delivery, and DOM verification after the web page is rendered by the web browser, to ensure the expected advertising elements are present.

These methods do not detect the presence of the Adblock extension directly, only the effects of the filters. They are vulnerable to continued filter updates, and whitelist-filtering web scripts with extensions such as NoScript.

An attempt was made to detect the plug-in itself, but that detection method was rendered unusable by the 0.7.5.2 update of Adblock Plus.^[23]

See also

Free software portal

• Privoxy
• Flashblock
• Ad filtering
• Online advertising
• List of Firefox extensions
• Hosts file
• AdBlock (Chrome) (an equivalent on Chrome and Safari)
• IE7Pro (an equivalent on Microsoft Internet Explorer including other features)

References

External links

• Adblock Plus (Official website)
• Adblock Plus on Mozilla Add-ons (Mozilla Foundation and/or Mozilla Corporation)
• Adblock Plus on Chrome Add-ons (Adblock Plus on Google Chrome extensions)
• Adblock Plus for Chrome (Official website of the Chrome extension)
• EasyList for Adblock Plus
• Adblock Plus presentation in How to Bypass Internet Censorship, a FLOSS Manual, 10 March 2011, 240 pp.
• Adblock Plus for Google Chrome Plugin