About Adblock Plus
What it is about
We want to make the Internet better for everyone. Purging bad ads is a good start.
Adblock Plus is an open-source project addressing the problem of annoying and intrusive online advertising by putting users in control. The extension allows defining filters that determine what a website is permitted to load, as well as provide a way to collapse unwanted sections of a web page (element hiding). People who don't have the knowledge or the time to create their own filters can choose from over fifty existing subscriptions that have been prepared by members of the Adblock Plus community and are constantly being updated.
More than 10 million people currently use Adblock Plus, a number that is steadily increasing. According to addons.mozilla.org, Adblock Plus has been both the most downloaded and the most used extension almost continuously since November 2006. PC World rated Adblock Plus as a top innovation in its 100 Best Products of 2007 list, and in March 2010 the project collected the Linux New Media award for the Best Open Source Firefox Extension.
Who we are — meet the community
The Adblock Plus project is an open community and owes its success to the dedication of many community members:
- Lead developer: Wladimir Palant
- Code contributors: Nickolay Ponomarev, Fabrice Desré, Rob Brown
- Dozens of filter subscription maintainers
- Subscription list managers: Michael, Eitan
- Over fifty translators who work on the extension and the website
- Over one hundred frequent forum members who help others, make suggestions and discuss proposed features
- Thousands of development build testers who install pre-release versions of Adblock Plus and report bugs
- Millions of happy users who spread the word about Adblock Plus
How it started
The original Adblock extension was created in 2002 by Henrik Aasted Sørensen who later transferred project ownership to rue. The add-on managed to attract a significant number of followers before it was ultimately abandoned in 2006, despite the fact that no version published since 2003 was designated as stable. In 2005 the lack of progress prompted community member Michael McDonald (mcm) to create a forked version called Adblock Plus, which added some highly desired functionality to the add-on. In January 2006 Wladimir Palant entirely rewrote Adblock Plus and made it a self-contained project. Less than a year later Adblock Plus was the most downloaded Firefox add-on, a position it has retained ever since.