update supporting 1.5 was released more than a month later. In the meantime McDonald had released a compatible Adblock Plus version for Firefox 1.5. Wladimir Palant wanted to help rue with the development of Adblock 0.5 but did not continue due to development disagreements. He eventually took over development of Adblock Plus from McDonald and rewrote the codebase, releasing Adblock Plus 0.6 in January 2006, thus making Adblock Plus a separate extension and not simply an enhanced version of Adblock. Development of the original Adblock stopped with version 0.5 and the project was abandoned in late 2006. History and statistics Michael McDonald created Adblock Plus 0.5, which improved on the original Adblock by incorporating the following features: whitelisting support for blocking background images subscription to filters with a fixed address and automatic updates the ability to hide HTML elements, allowing a greater range of images to be blocked the ability to hide ads on a per-site basis, instead of globally memory leak fixes improvements to the user interface McDonald discontinued development and transferred the name to Wladimir Palant, who released Adblock Plus 0.6 with a rewritten codebase in January 2006. PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007, featuring in at 95. AdBlock Plus was initially written around Mozilla's extension API. The extension supported not just Firefox, but less popular applications like SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Fennec, Prism, and even the Songbird media player because they each included Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Wladimir Palant expressed reluctance to support popular but technologically unrelated browsers and stated, "I am not going to maintain two unrelated projects." In 2010, AdBlock Plus acquired the existing AdThwart extension for Chrome. Palant used this as a base to build Adblock Plus for Google Chrome. It has been available since December 2010 and has over 10 million users. After Firefox and Microsoft Edge adopted Google's Web Extensions API, the Chrome version became the basis for those browsers as well. Ad Block Plus became the most popular extension for Firefox, with around 14 million users as of December 2017. Adblock Plus was released as an app for Android devices in November 2012. On March 3, 2013, the Android app was removed from the Google Play Store along with similar ad-blocking apps. Some apps remain in the Play Store with the caveat that they require root access in order to function. Adblock Plus, while not