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Adblock Plus Launches Adblock Browser: a Fork of Firefox For Android
An anonymous reader writes: Adblock Plus has launched Adblock Browser for Android. Currently in beta, the company's first browser was created by taking the open source Firefox for Android and including Adblock Plus out-of-the-box. The Firefox Sync functionality is disabled, as is the ability to use other addons. "Adblock Plus for Android got kicked out of Google Play along with other ad blocking apps in March 2013, because Google’s developer distribution agreement states apps cannot interfere with the functionality of other apps. Williams thus believes Adblock Browser “should be fine” as it only blocks ads that are shown as you browse the Web."
Pointless. Firefox for Android with ABP extension installed....is that not the same, but better?
Just install the standard Firefox on Android and load the uBlock add-on. It works brilliantly.
I used to be a devout Opera on Android user. While I miss some of the little touches (no pun intended) of Opera, I'm a Firefox convert.
The only thing I use Chrome for now is that abomination that is Amazon Instant Videos.
I use Firefox for Android on a daily basis and on a modern phone it runs fine, better that Chrome IMHO. Tried to use Adblock for a few days and it was insufferable. They will need to implement a better way to interact with Firefox code so it doesn't becomes a resource hog with thousands of regular expressions on memory. If they will ship the same extension, I don't see any advantage.
The ironic thing is that there's a much better AdBlocking plugin for Firefox for Android: uBlock. It's much lighter on resources than AdBlock. You're better off installing the real Firefox and uBlock than this thing.
I use Linux, so my initial response is to suggest using /etc/hosts. However, apparently macs put their /etc/hosts file in /private/etc/hosts. Just search for "how to edit /etc/hosts on mac"; that's how I found out the location. Anyway, just add entries like:
This works by lying to your computer about the DNS records for those websites. Any time a program tries to access one of those sites, the DNS lookup will come back as your local PC. If you don't have a web server, it won't show anything. Or if you install your own web server on your PC, you could have it set up to show funny videos of your cat instead of advertisements.
p.s. Another option is to add firewall rules to block specific domains.
oh, never mind, I see what you mean. Not through the play store, through firefox's plugin browser.
uBlock Origin is the original uBlock by gorhill - which was forked from HTTPSwitchboard. Gorhill gave uBlock ownership of uBlock to another team (see uBlock FAQ) , but still maintains his "personal" version... which has over a million users -- compared to the supposed official version uBlock - which has less than 80,000 users.
Interestingly enough, uMatrix - also by Gorhill is now available on Firefox, as well as Opera and Chrome.
Oddly enough, uBlock for FireFox doesn't appear to be related to Gorhill nor to the official uBlock team.