Help & setup
Rabbit Ad Blocker help.
Everything the extension does, in the order you are likely to need it. If something here doesn’t match what you’re seeing, tell us. One of the two is wrong and we’d like to know which.
Rabbit Ad Blocker is out. It is on the Chrome Web Store now, free, with no account and nothing collected. Firefox and Safari are not released yet, so the steps for those are here for when they are.
Add to ChromeStep one
Installing it.
Chrome and Edge
Open the Rabbit Ad Blocker listing in the Chrome Web Store, using the button above. Edge can install from there too, once you allow extensions from other stores.
Click Add to Chrome, then Add extension when the browser asks you to confirm.
Click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar and pin Rabbit, so the panel is one click away.
Load any page. Blocking starts straight away, and the panel shows you what it stopped.
Firefox
Open the Rabbit Ad Blocker page on addons.mozilla.org.
Click Add to Firefox, then Add when Firefox lists what the extension can do.
Tick the box to allow it in private windows if you want it there too.
Safari
Get Rabbit Ad Blocker from the Mac App Store.
Open Safari, go to Settings → Extensions, and switch Rabbit on.
Safari will ask which sites it may run on. Choose Always Allow on Every Website, or blocking only works where you said yes.
The panel, explained
Click the Rabbit icon and you get the whole interface. The switch in the top right turns blocking on and off everywhere, and it is green when Rabbit is working.
Blocked on this page is the big number, and the four counters under it say what made it up: Requests stopped before they loaded, Ad slots hidden in the page, Pop-ups and Video ads. That count starts again every time the page reloads, so a low number on a page you have had open for a while is normal.
Blocked all time is the running total since you installed it. It only goes up, and it never leaves your machine.
Pausing it, on one site or everywhere
The row in the middle of the popup names the site you are on. Pause here leaves Rabbit running everywhere else and stops it on this one, and it remembers, so you do not have to do it again next visit. The same button says Resume here once it is paused.
The switch at the top is the bigger hammer: it stops blocking on every site at once. Either way, reload the page afterwards. Rules apply as requests are made, so a page already on screen will not change until it loads again.
If a site only works with Rabbit paused, send us the address. A site that needs the blocker off is a filter problem, and we would rather fix it than leave you pausing it.
What it blocks
Two things happen at once. Requests to known ad and tracker hosts are stopped by the browser itself, using rules built from EasyList and EasyPrivacy. The ad is never downloaded, and Rabbit never sees the address you asked for.
Anything already sitting in the page, like an ad slot, an overlay or a promoted block, is hidden by a small script running on the page. That covers YouTube’s ad slots and overlays, and the Skip ad button, which Rabbit clicks for you as soon as it appears.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t argue with anti-adblock walls, it doesn’t touch video playback, and it can’t block an ad that arrives from the same address as the article you came to read. Filter lists ship with each release, so they refresh when you update the extension rather than in the background.
Where your data goes
Nowhere. The on/off setting, the sites you have paused it on and the counters sit in your browser’s local storage. There is no account, no sync, and no server of ours for the extension to talk to.
Nothing hidden
What it asks for, and why.
An extension can only do what you let it do, so here is the whole list, in plain words.
- Storage
- Remembers whether blocking is on, which sites you have paused it on, and the counters. Nothing else is kept.
- declarativeNetRequest
- Hands the block list to the browser, which applies it. Rabbit never receives the list of addresses you ask for.
- declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess
- Lets those rules apply on the sites you have given the extension access to.
- Access to all sites
- Ads and trackers turn up anywhere, so the rules have to be allowed to run anywhere. It is the biggest thing an ad blocker asks for, and the reason the extension ships unminified: you can unpack it and read what it does with the access.
Common questions
When it doesn’t behave.
The counter says 0 but I can see an ad.
Reload the page first, because the page counter starts again on every load. If the ad is still there, send us the address and we’ll add a rule for it.
A site stopped working properly.
Open the popup, press Pause here, reload the page, and carry on. Then tell us which site it was. Blocking something a site genuinely needs is a fault in the filter list, and we’d rather fix it than leave you pausing Rabbit.
YouTube ads still play sometimes.
Rabbit hides the ad slots it knows about and clicks Skip as soon as it appears. YouTube changes the shape of these regularly, so some get through until the next release.
Does it work in private or incognito windows?
Only if you allow it. Open your browser’s extensions page, find Rabbit, and turn on the option to run in private windows.
Do the filter lists update on their own?
Not yet. They are built into each release, so updating the extension is what refreshes them.
Is it going to stay free?
Yes. There is no paid tier planned, and no data collection quietly paying for it either.
Still stuck
Ask us directly.
Send us the site, the browser and what you expected to happen, and we’ll pick it up. The contact page writes the email for you, or you can take the address and write to us yourself.
support@rabbitlabs.app