Adblock Plus Will Soon Block Fewer Ads

Frederic Lardinois

Dec 12, 2011 — 1 min read

AdBlock Plus, the popular ad-blocking plugin for Firefox and Chrome, will soon stop blocking “non-intrusive” ads by default. AdBlock Plus, of course, became as popular as it is today because it scrubbed websites from intrusive, loud ads and pop-ups that can make surfing the web such a hassle if you mistakenly end up on the wrong site.

According to an announcement by the plugin’s developer Wladimir Palant, the idea behind this change is to allow users to “support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. […] In the long term the web will become a better place for everybody, not only Adblock Plus users. Without this feature we run the danger that increasing Adblock Plus usage will make small websites unsustainable.”

The news went mostly unnoticed last week, but was widely disseminated on sites like Reddit and Hacker News in the last 24 hours.

As a publishers who relies on ads to monetize this site, I obviously agree with his sentiment. Most AdBlock Plus users, however, seem to disagree with this change.

What’s Makes an Ad Non-Intrusive?

According to Palant’s policies, static advertisements without animations and sound and text ads will qualify for inclusion in this whitelist. Advertisers will also have to support Do Not Track, though this feature isn’t turned on in the development versions of the plugin yet.

According to AdBlock Plus’ announcement, the team has made “agreements with some websites and advertisers that only advertising matching our criteria will be used.” It’s not clear if any money exchanged in return for placement on the whitelist.

On by Default

By default, this whitelist will be on. Palant argues that users would never turn this feature on if it wasn’t the default setting. Advertisers, however, “will only be interested in switching to better ways of advertising if the majority of Adblock Plus users has this feature enabled.” Users can, of course, disable this feature at any time or manage their own personal whitelist as well (and we would appreciate if you added this site to yours…).

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls