I’ve been trying to get several of my sites updated over the past couple hours. One the things I needed to do was replace the Download Firefox 3.5 image provided by SpreadFirefox.com with a new Download Firefox 3.6 image. Should be fairly simple, all I had to do was copy and paste the HTML code from the Spread Firefox site into my website code. I’ve done this many, many times before with no problems. It even shows up in my WYSIWYG Web Authoring  Program (NVU). However, once I uploaded the pages to the server the logo would no longer show up.

I looked through my code and even copied the image source (location) directly into my web browser and the image shows up on the Spread Firefox site (sfx-images.mozilla.org). Since I had it opened, I decided to take a look at my site in Chrome and what da ya know there’s the purple Firefox 3.6 button!

Next step was to open up my Adblock Plus Preferences by clicking on the ABP icon. Sure enough I discovered a BLOCK entry (shows as red text in the list) for: http://sfx-images.mozilla.org/firefox/3.6/*. To ‘fix’ this highlight the entry press ENTER and then click ‘Add filter…’ Reloading the page should bring up the missing image.

Now, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t by accident created this Block entry so I check the site with my Firefox 3.5 profile which currently had no extensions installed. After installing Adblock Plus and restarting Firefox 3.5, sure enough the image was gone. I looked in the Adblock Plus Preferences and there it was being blocked with a filter source of EasyList (USA). Now, I have no idea why the group which distributes The EasyList (USA) filter is choosing to block the Spread Firefox images coming from the Mozilla site.

I did send a message to the Affiliates with Spread Firefox letting them know of my findings. I imagine this has been an ongoing issue, but may be they can provide some insight into this issue. I doubt I’ll hear anything back for at least a couple days though.

Update: MonztA was replied with a discussion link on the Adblock EasyList Forum from June 2009 where the affiliates were complaining ABP was breaking their site (along with globally blocking their images). They have since White Listed spreadfirefox.com affiliates button section URL, but not the images URL. The reasoning behind the latter was simply because these are ads, for Firefox.

After some thought on this, I’ve come to the realization that yes I am trying to advertise Firefox on my site and therefore the people are not using Firefox are going to see the button. If the visitor is already using Firefox (and with ABP) then the ‘advertisement’ is pointless anyways. The only exception is where I am trying to ‘promote’ the newer version (Firefox 3.6) but I can do that in other ways that won’t be affected by ABP.