How Adblock Plus is Getting Ready for Manifest V3

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https://adblockplus.org/en/download

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Our mission is to block all ads, pop-ups, and distractions so you can focus on a stress-free internet experience. We spend thousands of hours each year ensuring that Adblock Plus works in the web browsers our users rely on: specifically Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft’s Edge browser, and Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Usually this work happens behind the scenes, with little fanfare. Occasionally, however, we need to make substantial changes to ensure Adblock Plus keeps up with the browser ecosystem. We’re on the cusp of one such change, which is the result of changes Google is making to how browser extensions work in Chrome. Called Manifest V3 name refers to a new version of Google’s browser extension platform—this evolution of the browser ecosystem will change how all browser extensions work, and bring some challenges along with it.

Our goal is to navigate all of these changes so that you never notice a difference in the high-quality ad blocking you’ve come to expect from us. Some eagle-eyed users may notice a few changes, and we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a bit of the unglamorous—but vitally important—work our team is doing behind the scenes to ensure Adblock Plus works seamlessly for you now and in the future.

What Does This Mean for You?

While the specific rollout plan for Manifest V3 is still being finalized, we know that starting in mid-2023 all browser extensions will need to be updated to meet new browser requirements. Our goal is to make this process completely seamless for you, you may notice some changes going forward. We’ve highlighted these changes below:

Filter List Availability

Adblock Plus, like all ad blockers, relies on predefined rules to know what to block and hide on the web pages you visit. These rules are collected into lists, also called, “filter lists.”

When you think of filter lists, it helps to think of a coffee filter. Coffee filters trap coffee grounds while letting the liquid coffee flow through. Ad blocking filter lists do the same thing, only they let the content you want to see flow through to your browser while keeping annoying ads away.

With Manifest V3, Adblock Plus is required to limit how many filter lists we have available to users. To comply with this new rule, we’ll now offer 50 pre-installed filter lists that you can turn on and off depending on your preferences. From these available filter lists, users will be able to choose 10 that they can keep turned on at any given time.

We’re working to ensure that popular filter lists our users love are supported by us, and that any updates to these lists are brought to you by frequent new releases of the extension. This does mean that our users will no longer be able to subscribe to any filter lists outside of what is provided in the extension. Of course, we are open to hearing your thoughts if there’s a filter list that you want us to support. You’re always welcome to reach out to us so that we can gather that feedback!

A Change to How We Address Ad Circumvention

Currently, our filter lists are updated automatically—often on a daily basis. So if you see an ad that has managed to get around the ad blocking filter, it’s typically taken care of right away because of these updates. Moving forward, we’ll no longer be able to enable automatic daily updates to filter lists. Instead, our developers will be frequently releasing new versions of the extension to address any ads that are circumventing our filters and still showing to users. Our goal is to ensure most users won’t notice a difference, as we plan to increase how much we release the extension to keep up with changing ads and filter lists.

When Should You Expect to See Changes?

Keep an eye out for news from us, as we’ll let you know when the official release for the Manifest V3 version of the Adblock Plus extension happens. We’ll make sure to announce it on this blog and our social media channels.

 

silversurfer

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Guess even a new MV3 developed version of Adblock Plus is unable to filter stuff what we users call "cosmetic filtering"
 
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ForgottenSeer 97327

Disclaimer: I am by no way an expert, I am just an interested user who has some basic HTML, CSS knowledge because I made two websites for friends of my wife (using off the shelve configurable libraries and plugins). This is what I understand/know about this topic (in layman's language explained because I am an amateur, so please correct me when I am wrong).

The irony is that Google introduced MV3 to grant less permissions to extensions, but extension developers have found a way to bypass this.

From what I have read mr Gorhill wanted to develop a permission less extension (how Google intended it) . GorHill's opinion sort of shifted, because uBO-lite now requires permission when the user wants to use more advanced block rules. These complex cosmetic rules are not enforced by the browser (the browser enforces simple host-file like rules). An element picker creates on the fly rules. The only way to apply these on the fly created rules is via the service worker mechanism (static rules are only updated when the extension is updated)

The service worker injecting these rules has to be started / spawned over and over again by the extension, because the browser kills the service worker every now and then to free up resources. Because mr GorHill does not want (or wanted) to use such a mechanisme because of the performance implications, I think it is unlikely uBO-lite will get an element picker (as said his opinion is shifting, so he might surprise us one day).

For the moment only AdGuard MV3 offers an element picker. I have to give compliments to the AdGuard team who used the loopholes Google left in Manifest3 in a very creative manner. From what I understand of it AG MV3 even offers more powerful (regular expression based) cosmetic filtering (see link1 and link2) than before the Manifest3 restrictions.

I am leaning towards the views of the AdGuard team. My wife's laptop (with Ryzen 5) is four times as fast as my old (i7) desktop and has so much memory and a fast m2 ssd that the performance and memory consumption of a service worker is a non-isssue in daily usage and practice. I am currently using Ghostery, but I have AG_MV3 on my wife's laptop (because Ghostery throws 'Never-Consent' popups to suppress popups :unsure: ).

Mr GorHill redefined adblocking with his innovative content blockers (uMatrix and uBlock), but AG team pioneer work will led the way to adblocking in the MV3-area. The ABP-team probably also will use and learn from the work of AG-team (like Mr GorHill who also used a lot of their ideas and open source code as inspiration). Credits to AG-team.
 
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Gandalf_The_Grey

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Adblock Plus 3.15 for Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Opera released
This release introduces Adblock Plus Premium with the Premium-exclusive Distraction Control functionality. It also includes significant under-the-hood changes to make Adblock Plus compatible with Manifest v3, as well as various important bug fixes.

User interface changes​

  • Introduced Adblock Plus Premium (ui#981, ui#985, ui#1139, ui#1200).
  • Improved on how idle state is shown in icon popup (ui#842).
  • Added filter validation error message when adding too many custom filters under Manifest v3 (ewe#243).
  • Made user interface compatible with Manifest v3 (ui#1070, ui#1071, ui#1079, ui#1080, ui#1086).
  • Fixed: Acceptable Ads survey dialog was flickering when disabling Acceptable Ads (ui#581).
  • Fixed: When navigating from an allowlisted page, the toolbar icon continued to indicate that the page is allowlisted (ui#1120).
  • Fixed: Filters with $popup option were not shown in developer tools panel (ui#1128, ewe#234).

Filter changes​

Upgraded EWE to 0.6.1 (release notes: 0.5.0, 0.6.0, 0.6.1) (ui#1176, ui#1195, ui#1257), which includes the following changes:
  • Snippet changes
  • Upgraded adblockpluscore to 0.9.1 (release notes: 0.8.0, 0.9.0, 0.9.1) (ewe#309, ewe#341).
  • Fixed: Allowlisting filter with $document option was not applied to aborted frames (ewe#230).

Chromium-specific changes​

  • Fixed: Acceptable Ads checkboxes had visual glitch in older Chromium versions (ui#1178).

Firefox-specific changes​

  • Fixed: Adblock Plus failed to initialize when using Firefox in Private Browsing mode (ui#1129, ewe#231, ewe#369).

Yandex Browser-specific changes​

  • Fixed: Adblock Plus failed to initialize when Yandex search page was open on browser start (ui#1160, ewe#309).
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Adblock Plus 3.15.1 for Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Opera

Snippet changes​

Upgraded @eyeo/snippets to 0.5.5 (release notes: 0.5.4, 0.5.5), which includes the following changes:
  • Made the hide-if-graph-matches snippet compatible with Manifest v3.
  • When debug directive is used, race provides the winner name when any snippet wins a race.
  • Fixed: override-property-read snippet broke when used with multiple non-existent references.
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Gandalf_The_Grey

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Introducing Adblock Plus Premium
The internet is an ever evolving place, and with its evolution comes even more distractions. For years, internet users have battled annoying ads and pop-ups. And now internet users are faced with all kinds of additional distractions including newsletter pop-ups, survey requests, allow-site notifications, and floating videos that follow you around your screen as you browse.

Which is why we’re excited to introduce Adblock Plus Premium. Adblock Plus Premium will be a collection of additional ad blocking features available at an affordable price for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. With Adblock Plus Premium, our ultimate goal is to bring you features that will allow you to further take control of your internet experience and browse the web the way you want to.

At the moment, we’re launching Premium with one primary feature to block additional distractions. When you turn on the block additional distractions feature, you’ll be able to:

Stop floating videos. Hide the videos used by many websites that follow you around as you browse. Remove newsletter pop-ups. Put an end to the pop-ups websites use to get you to sign up for their emails and newsletter lists. Block site notifications and survey requests. Many websites ask to track your location or ask you to participate in short surveys. Now we’ll automatically decline these requests from the websites you visit.
Of course, we will always keep our basic ad blocking features free because we believe they should be. Adblock Plus Premium simply gives us a way to provide additional features for those who’d like to get more out of the extension.

We know that we wouldn’t be where we are today without the support we’ve received from users. Many of our users have chosen to donate to us over the years, which has allowed us to keep doing what we do. To those users, we’d like to say thank you by offering access to Adblock Plus Premium to anyone that has donated to us in the past. To unlock your free access, click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click on “Donated to Adblock Plus before?” underneath the payment section and follow the instructions on the screen.
 

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