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AdBlock Plus add-on broke Facebook today, not a filter list problem. Win7 32-bit, FF vn 60.8.0esr - how do I fix it?

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Everything was fine till today, but now Facebook will only open properly if I disable AdBlock Plus. Disabling AdBlock Plus' filter lists doesn't help. All other websites I've tried work fine with the add-on enabled. The problem doesn't happen on Windows 10 64-bit for which Firefox is on a different upgrade channel.

Everything was fine till today, but now Facebook will only open properly if I disable AdBlock Plus. Disabling AdBlock Plus' filter lists doesn't help. All other websites I've tried work fine with the add-on enabled. The problem doesn't happen on Windows 10 64-bit for which Firefox is on a different upgrade channel.

All Replies (8)

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You should contact AdBlock support.

Disable AdBlock on that site. Is the problem still there? Tell them this.

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FredMcD said

You should contact AdBlock support.

Thanks for your advice. I already told them. When an add-on malfunctions it's hard to know whether it's the add-on itself or the host. What may point to Firefox as the culprit here is that the exact same version of the add-on (i.e. the latest) works fine in Firefox on another machine which has a 64-bit OS. 32-bit Firefox has a different upgrade path so the versions have to be different. In both cases Firefox is supported and as up-to-date as can be of course.

Disable AdBlock on that site. Is the problem still there?

As I said in my original question, "Facebook will only open properly if I disable AdBlock Plus." So yes, the problem does go away when I disable ABP.

Tell them this.

I've told them, still waiting for their reply. if they give me any salient advice I'll post here to say so.

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For now, leave ADB disabled for that site.

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FredMcD said

For now, leave ADB disabled for that site.

Yes of course.

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All sites are in a cat and dog fight with ads and adblockers. The company (Facebook) will make some changes in their code which will break the function or the browser from interpreting the call/info.

So that being said ADB could update their code in a day or so and it will work again. You can also run other blockers such as : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ghostery/

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Thought might draw your attention to this to see if it is of any use to you : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/facebook-container/

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If you use Adblock Plus then you can consider uBlock Origin as a replacement to see if that works better (lower memory footprint).

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Shadow110 said

All sites are in a cat and dog fight with ads and adblockers. The company (Facebook) will make some changes in their code which will break the function or the browser from interpreting the call/info. So that being said ADB could update their code in a day or so and it will work again. You can also run other blockers such as : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ghostery/

Yes it did cross my mind that Facebook had deliberately changed something to break AdBlock. But why would they only do that to 32-bit? I think it must be down to a change in Facebook (all was fine till the other day, no problem with other websites, full system restore doesn't fix it), but I suspect it's something Facebook did by accident rather than design. Thanks to all for the suggestions of alternative add-ons. Facebook Container is particularly interesting to me because it purports to remove tracking. Another good one is Social Fixer, which allows me to block elements in a similar way to Adblock Plus. https://socialfixer.com/features.html