Adblock Plus slow to initialise (FF29)

[stuck]

As far as I can make out Adblock Plus released an update to coincide with the release of FF29.

Neither my XPMCE desktop PC nor my Win 7 Starter Ed. netbook updated to FF29 until many days after the actual release date of FF29 but I think Adblock Plus did update silently as soon as it's new version became available.

Even though both my machines are now on FF 29.0.1 and Adblock Plus 2.6.1 Ablock Plus is so slow to initialise/load/start, i.e the icon does not appear on the toolbar, that my homepage loads with all the ads showing. Once the icon does appear and I do a page refresh then ads disappear and thereafter all is well, surfing to new pages is OK, the ads are hidden. It's only the initial start up.

I've already tried removing the filter subscriptions and putting them back again and removing and reloading Adblock Plus and clearing the FF cache not to mention just about every permutation involving those ideas and restating FF and rebooting the PC but all to no avail. I don't get an ad free home page out of the box.

My latest idea was to set a blank page as my home page but even with that although FF opens as expected the Adblock Plus icon does not appear for a looooong time.

My Googling on this issue has turned up nothing. Anyone else noticed a change in Adblock Plus behaviour since FF29?
edit: just found this:
https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22906
so I'm not alone!

Ken

[HansV]

It's an intentional change! See Faster Firefox startup:

We’ve received lots of complains over time about Adblock Plus slowing down Firefox startup considerably. It’s not that we didn’t listen but this is really a tricky problem. However, Brian Nicholson from Mozilla pointed out that there is a relatively simple solution and this solution has been implemented now. Starting with Adblock Plus 2.5.1.3778 Firefox seems to start up almost as fast with Adblock Plus as it does without. The only disadvantage should be that Adblock Plus is ready a bit later and the first page loading might still have ads.

and:

No, this won’t be optional

Suggested workarounds from Adblock Plus 2.6 starts late, impacting initial page:

If you have Firefox set to restore previously open tabs when it starts up,

1. Under Options/Preferences - Tabs, make sure "Don't load tabs until selected" is checked.
2. Exit Firefox with a blank tab as the selected tab.

If you have Firefox set to open your homepage when it starts up, there's no convenient solution that I can think of. You could

1. Add the -offline parameter to the Firefox shortcut, so that it starts in Offline mode (meaning it won't load anything that's not in the cache).
   https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozi ... ne_Options" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
2. Install the Work Offline add-on and click its toolbar button to go online.
   https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/work-offline/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
3. Reload the page.

Not very attractive...

[stuck]

Not very attractive...

Agreed.

I can't help feeling that this intentional change is because the developers are being leaned upon by 'Big Business' to limit the effectiveness of the ad-blocking. Remember, they've already had to include an option to 'allow some non-intrusive' adds.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to go for the 'roll back to less than v2.5.1.3778' route and turn off auto-updating of Adblock.

Ken