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Revision as of 04:23, 11 February 2011

Adblock Plus
Developer(s)Henrik Aasted Sorensen,
Michael McDonald,
Wladimir Palant
Stable release
1.3.3 / December 23, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-12-23)
Written inJavaScript, XUL, CSS
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeMozilla extension Chrome extension
LicenseMPL
Websiteadblockplus.org
Related articles
Origins and lineage
Category

Adblock Plus (ABP) is a content-filtering extension for Mozilla Firefox- and Mozilla Application Suite and Google Chrome-based web browsers. ABP, a forked version of Adblock, allows users to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being downloaded and displayed.

Adblock Plus

How it works

File:Compaadblocker.png
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.[1]

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.[2]

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.[3] 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[4]), but other filtersets can added by typing their addresses. A list of known Adblock Plus subscriptions is maintained on the Adblock Plus official website.

EasyList

EasyList is the most popular Adblock Plus filter list with over 4 million subscribers.[5] Created by Rick Petnel,[6] 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[7][8] and Palant named a user going by the name "Ares2" as the new maintainer.[9]

Adblock

Adblock was the original extension from which ABP is derived. 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.[10]

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome is available since Dec 2010.[11][12]

Awards

  • PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007.[13]

Controversy

See also: Online advertising § Ethics

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.[14]

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[15] and opposing[citation needed] the assertion that blocking ads is wrong.[16] Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant responded to this in his blog.[17]

Detection

Some webmasters have used JavaScript to detect the effects of the popular Adblock filters.[18] 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.[19]

See also

References

  1. ^ How does element hiding work?
  2. ^ http://adblockplus.org/en/history
  3. ^ Adblock Plus Documentation - Specifying Filter Options
  4. ^ "Adblock Plus FAQ - Do I need to install Filterset.G Updater?". Retrieved 2007-12-07.
  5. ^ http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
  6. ^ Whoriskey, Peter (2008-06-25). "One Man, One Long List, No More Web Ads". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-04-23.
  7. ^ Petnel, Richard J. Obituary
  8. ^ Adblock Plus Blog: Sad news
  9. ^ http://adblockplus.org/blog/what-is-going-on-with-easylist
  10. ^ Adblock Plus :: Statistics Dashboard :: Firefox Add-ons
  11. ^ Adblock Plus on Chrome Extensions Center
  12. ^ ChromeFans: Adblock Plus now available for Chrome
  13. ^ "PC World - The 100 Best Products of 2007". PC World. Retrieved 2007-08-19.
  14. ^ Firefox AdBlock Foe Calls For Mozilla Boycott
  15. ^ Ad Blocking is Immoral
  16. ^ Firefox ad-blocker extension causes angst
  17. ^ Adblock Plus and (a little) more
  18. ^ AdblockPlus Detection
  19. ^ Adblock Plus Release Notes
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