From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adblock Plus
Developer:	Henrik Aasted Sorensen, Michael McDonald, Wladimir Palant
Latest release:	0.7.5.3 / September 21, 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Mozilla extension
License:	MPL
Website:	http://adblockplus.org/

Firefox (category)
Mozilla
Foundation • Corporation
Community / Customization
Features • Extensions (category) Spread Firefox • Adoption • Firemonger
Forks and Related Projects
Flock • GNU IceWeasel Portable Edition • Netscape 9 Swiftfox • Swiftweasel Miro • Songbird XeroBank
Origins and Lineage
Mozilla Application Suite Netscape Communicator Netscape Communications Corp. The Book of Mozilla
This box: view • talk • edit

Adblock is a content-filtering extension for the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Application Suite web browsers. Adblock allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed.

Due to stagnation in the upstream development since 2004, a forked version called Adblock Plus has risen to prominence. It features improvements to the user interface, filter subscriptions, and element hiding. It has become one of the most popular extensions.

Contents 1 Adblock Plus 1.1 How it Works 1.2 History 2 Filters 2.1 Filter subscriptions 3 Awards 4 Criticism 5 Detection 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

Adblock Plus focuses on usability with many new and improved features being added. Its main window has clearly defined menu items at the top. Also, the list of blockable items is integrated as a sidebar which can be detached from the main window. Element hiding can be used in addition to regular ad blocking. Other new features include filter statistics (hits counter) and the ability to enable or disable individual filters without removing them^{[citation needed]}.

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^{[citation needed]}.

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.
• Can 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^{[citation needed]}.

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 ^[1].

The following is a list of example filters for Adblock.

Blocks the donation banner on Wikipedia:

wikipedia.org#DIV(id=siteNotice)

Blocks ads in any directory called "banners", or any case insensitive equivalent:

 */banners/*

Whitelist a website:

 @@http://www.google.com/

Blocks ads on Yahoo!:

/yimg\.com(.*/adv/|/a[^u])(?!vision)/

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 ^[2]), but other filtersets can added by typing their addresses. A list of known Adblock Plus subscriptions is maintained on the Adblock Plus official website.

• PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007.^[3]

Website owner Danny Carlton, aka Jack Lewis, claims that ad blocking steals from website owners and believes that the Mozilla Foundation bears responsibility for endorsing and distributing the plug-in.^[4] Wladimir Palant responded to this in his blog.^[5]

Adblock Plus has also received criticism for dropping the site-blocking feature found in Adblock.^{[citation needed]}

Some webmasters have used JavaScript to detect the effects of the popular Adblock filters.^[6] This has been done by generating a honeypot-like URL and verifying its delivery and also by more advanced verification of the DOM after the web page is rendered in 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, and are vulnerable to continued updates to the filters.

An attempt was made to detect the plug-in itself but that detection method was rendered unusable by the 7.5.2 update of AdBlock Plus ^[7].

• Flashblock
• Ad filtering
• Online advertising
• List of Firefox extensions
• Hosts file
• IE7pro, an equivalent on IE7

1. ^ Adblock Plus Documentation - Specifying Filter Options
2. ^ Adblock Plus FAQ - Do I need to install Filterset.G Updater?. Retrieved on 2007-12-07.
3. ^ PC World - The 100 Best Products of 2007. PC World. Retrieved on 2007-08-19.
4. ^ Firefox ad-blocker extension causes angst
5. ^ Adblock Plus and (a little) more
6. ^ AdblockPlus Detection
7. ^ Adblock Plus Release Notes

Adblock

• Adblock on Mozilla Add-ons

Adblock Plus

• Adblock Plus official website
• Adblock Plus on Mozilla Add-ons
• Adblock Plus 0.5.x MozillaZine forum thread
• Adblock Plus contributors

Information

• A not so short history of Adblock
• Adblock - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
• Adblock/Adblock Plus manual

Filter subscriptions

• Known Adblock subscriptions

Commentaries

• Nick Carr AdBlock Plus can quietly kill ads - and perhaps the internet economy The Guardian September 20 2007
• Noam Cohen Whiting Out the Ads, but at What Cost? New York Times September 3 2007
• Noam Cohen Adblock Plus threatens the online revenue model International Herald Tribune September 2 2007