Frequently Asked Questions - Installation
How do I install Adblock Plus for all users and make everybody use the same filter list?
Are you an administrator making Adblock Plus available to all users? Then you will need to install Adblock Plus into the browser’s application directory. For SeaMonkey this is (unfortunately) the only option, in Firefox you create a subdirectory {d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d} in its extensions directory and unpack the contents of adblockplus.xpi there (it is a regular ZIP file).
Now you need to change the default Adblock Plus settings. Locate the file adblockplus.js (this is extensions/{d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}/defaults/preferences/adblockplus.js in Firefox and defaults/pref/adblockplus.js in SeaMonkey) and edit it. You probably don’t want that users are bothered with the Adblock Plus icon so you can change extensions.adblockplus.showintoolbar and extensions.adblockplus.showinstatusbar to false. If you don’t want that users get the suggestion to install a subscription when they start Firefox for the first time you also change extensions.adblockplus.currentversion to “1.0”.
Finally you might want to make everybody use the same filter list. To do so you change the default settings for extensions.adblockplus.patternsfile. By default this file is stored in user’s profile directory (relative path), use an absolute path to set a fixed location for everybody. Make sure that everybody can read the file but you are the only one having write access to it — now you can start your browser and add some filters/subscriptions that everybody will use. The changes users make to the filter list won’t persist since they don’t have write access to the file.
If you really want to make Adblock Plus invisible in the user interface you can also add a filter to remove it from the Tools menu and the context menu.
Why is it impossible to install Adblock Plus into a SeaMonkey profile?
Unfortunately, Adblock Plus requires an XPCOM component to function and as of now SeaMonkey does not support installing these components into profile directory (bug 45701). Profile installation is only possible for extensions that don’t need to install an XPCOM component. This will change with SeaMonkey 2.0 when the extension installation system from Firefox will be ported over to SeaMonkey. If you do not wish to run SeaMonkey as administrator to install Adblock Plus, see the next question.
How do I install Adblock Plus without running SeaMonkey (e.g. with a script)?
Especially people who are using nightly builds on a regular basis need a simple way of taking extensions over to the new installation. To install Adblock Plus the following files must be copied over into the new SeaMonkey application directory:
- chrome/adblockplus.jar
- components/nsAdblockPlus.js
- components/nsAdblockPlus.xpt
- defaults/pref/adblockplus.js
You can also extract these files from adblockplus.xpi which is a regular ZIP package. After that you need to create a file named .autoreg in your SeaMonkey application directory (make sure it has a current modification date e.g. with the touch command) and you can start SeaMonkey — Adblock Plus is installed.
How do I install Adblock Plus in K-Meleon?
K-Meleon builds of Adblock Plus and installation instructions can be found here.