| Developer(s) | Henrik Aasted Sørensen, Michael McDonald, Wladimir Palant |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.0.2 / December 27, 2011 |
| Written in | JavaScript, XUL, CSS |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Mozilla extension |
| License | MPL |
| Website | adblockplus.org/ |
Adblock Plus (ABP) is a content-filtering 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.
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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]
Michael McDonald created Adblock Plus 0.5 that improved on Adblock by incorporating the following features:
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 is available since Dec 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.
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.
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 is the most popular Adblock Plus filter list with over 12 million subscribers.[7] Created by Rick Petnel,[8] 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[9][10] and Palant named a user going by the name "Ares2" as the new maintainer.[11]
http://fanboy.co.nz/ 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 list are available for Firefox, Iron-Chrome, IE and Opera.
Both EasyList and Fanboy's have had controversy over whitelisting tracking and advertising sites.
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.[12]
Although Adblock Plus is not supported by 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.
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. 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.[13]
Some websites have taken counter-measures against ad-blocking software, such as attempting to detect the presence of ad blockers and informing users of their views, or outright preventing users from accessing the content unless they disable the ad-blocking software. There have been several arguments supporting[14] and opposing[15] the assertion that blocking ads is wrong.[16] Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant responded to this in his blog.[17]
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.[18]
Some webmasters have used JavaScript to detect the effects of the popular Adblock filters.[19] 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, and by whitelist-filtering web scripts with an extension 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.[20]