Adblock Plus & Subscription Faqs
Things to know about ABP and Filter Subcriptions
I wrote this article to straighten out some common misconceptions about Adblock Plus and its subscriptions ... rick752
The most noted misconceptions about Adblock Plus are:
- "Adblock Plus is blocking [whatever]...."
FALSE!
ABP by itself blocks nothing on its own! ... only 'Subscriptions' or filters do. Adblock Plus is a fabulous piece of work created & maintained by Wladimir Palant ... but it comes as an empty, non-blocking program that is awaiting instructions on what to do. It will not block anything at all if it is not given any instructions.
When ABP is installed for the first time, it will ask you if you want to 'subscribe' to a known maintained list of 3rd-party filters.
If you select one or have installed one, this now becomes the responsibily of the subscription author and not the ABP author.
In other words, if you install my EasyList subscripton and there is a blocking issue, it is MY responsibily and not any fault or problem of ABP. Do not complain about ABP because something is blocked! Also, any filters under any filter directory named 'Advertisement filters', 'Element hiding rules', or 'Exception rules' are YOUR OWN filters and no one elses. If you don't know what they are, delete them.
ps: The EasyList is NOT "the default filters that come with Adblock Plus".
- "ABP doesn't block Flash images......"
FALSE!
I don't know how THAT got started, but ABP blocks flash as well as images, external scripting, stylesheets, frames, tracking, webbugs, html elements, text ads, backgrounds, leftover spaces, etc. ... and can "hide" any class, id, or any other css or html tag, too. It can even block selected items that are 'sub-elements' of a flash feed. ABP is capable of blocking ANYTHING that is called into a site page as an external 'request' ... and can 'hide' any element within the html of a page.
The only thing is that you can't use the right-click method to block flash because ABP's right-click menu is overridden by the flash content's menu (it is why many think that flash cannot be blocked in ABP). You either have to enable "Show tabs on flash and java" in ABP's OPTIONS or go to the "Blockable items" list to look for an item TYPE that is listed listed as an OBJECT ... those are usually the flash items that are on the page.
- "ABP removes items but the item is still downloaded...."
FALSE!
When ABP blocks something, it is "blocked"! ABP blocks 'requests' per filtering. Any normal filter string will not even call that address at all ... it's like it was removed from the html to begin with.
Only element-hiding rules (items that use # in the filtering to remove actual html elements) are downloaded ... but just hidden on your browser. Only my EasyElement subscription contains element hiding rules which are only 'hidden' ... those are still downloaded. The main EasyList subscription contains "blocking" rules ... and they do what they say, "block at the source".
These 2 types of filter rules have different uses and are both supported by ABP.
- What's the difference between Adblock Plus and the original Adblock?
Adblock hasn't been touched since January 2006, and nobody has heard from its maintainer since February 2006. The project and its forum have been all but abandoned. Support & development for Adblock is almost totally non-existent.
Adblock Plus is NOT an 'upgrade' of the original Adblock ... they are 2 separate programs with different authors.
Most of the subscriptions made for ABP are incompatible with the old Adblock because of options and features that it does not have and cannot use .... like element-hiding rules (for hiding ANY specific html element) and file-type options (for blocking only script, image, stylesheet, frames, objects, etc) that can be added to individual filter strings. And all subscriptions that are listed for use in ABP can autoupdate through ABP itself without the use of any external extension (like filterset.g's updater extension).
ABP can also process thousands of filters quickly if they are 'optimized' to be used on ABP.
20 or 30 optimized filter strings made for ABP can process as fast as one filter string can on the old Adblock.
Adblock Plus is constantly under development, packs more features, and there are solid support sites for both the program itself and also for the filter subscription authors (like me :-).
ABP also has unique features like individual filter string on/off toggling, last filter hit date, file types, hit counting, etc . There are also more pinpoint "options" for filter-string writing that let you target frames, images, scripting , css, objects and backgrounds that only work for ABP, not for the original Adblock.
- Use Filterset.G and the Filterset Updater extension with ABP...
FALSE!
Filterset.G is not even recommended with Adblock Plus by Wladimir Palant, the author of ABP. See here::
http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_project#filterset.g
The main reasons are that the filters are un-optimized (slow) for ABP and the regexp filtering expressions are too 'combined' & difficult to understand ... this makes isolating a problem filter string very difficult. The Filterset Updater is redundant with ABP's own built-in updater and the whitelistings are too general in nature (many problems by G's filters have been blamed on ABP in the past). Filterset.G also does not use any of the more powerful newer filter switches or element-hiding rules that are supported by ABP because it is still designed for the "abandoned" original Adblock extension. He is also not part of the ABP forum community which makes intercommunication between his filterset and the ABP community non-existent.
... so if you want to use Filterset.G, you may want to just go back to the old Adblock instead. These are the filters subscriptions that are recommended for Adblock Plus by its author:
http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
|
