Adblock plus is a really great extension for Firefox and it’s always the first one I install on a new fresh Firefox installation (with Tab Mix Plus). But did you notice that Adblock plus blocks more and more things, and sometimes things that are not ad?

I’ll give you 3 examples but lots of more are available on the net. These 3 examples happened on my blog.

If you have a top image on your website and you want to call it banner.jpg, forget it or it will never displayed because all pictures named banner are blocked. This is not a big deal, you (the webmaster) just have to rename the image but if you have to know all patterns Adblock plus have to be sure your images will not be blocked, it will take you lot of times!

The second example is worst, if you (the webmaster) want to use Google analytics to have some stats about your website, you have to know that Adblock plus blocks everything that is coming from www.google-analytics.com. The “Filter von Dr.Evil (Deutschland)” list adds the pattern "|http://www.google-analytics.com/$match-case" so you will never have any statistics from users that installed Ablock plus because the javascript will never be called on these browsers. That’s annoying for the webmaster because they will not have all information but it’s also annoying for the Ablock plus users because they think their browsers will block… ad and not statistics. I think statistics don’t bother users so I don’t understand why they are filtered. The sad thing is that there’s no workaround for this, the only solution is that each user removes the pattern. But how many users know this problem and know how to remove the pattern?

The third example is even worst; I used this page to add a little button on my website. This button is really useful for users because it enables users to add, in one click, a rss feed in Google reader or Google homepage. But the “Cédrics Liste (Deutschland)” Adblock plus list contains the pattern "/[\/\.]google(\/box|_ads|syndication|-analytics)(?!-)/" that will remove the button, so Adblock plus users will never see the () button.

I saw lot of other annoying examples on Internet, some pictures were missing in the menu, some texts are telling us to click on the next button but the button is blocked and is not visible…

So if you see some strange things on a website, try to see if it’s not due to Adblock plus.