How to Fix Adblock Plus clash with Lijit search

Firefox users: To disable Adblock Plus on Lijit.com (or any site), you’ll need to add this handy red icon to your toolbar.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying out the search widget Lijit on this site — not just for site search, but as a “me collector” (to aggregate all my content posted in various places online). It appears to be working fine — except in the Firefox web browser, where I’ve hit a snag.

Turns out that Lijit search and the popular Firefox add-on Adblock Plus (which I use) don’t play nicely with each other at this point. Consequently, if you view Contentious using Firefox (at least the Mac version) and try to conduct a Lijit search, it’ll probably just hang there and deliver no results. However, the Lijit search for my site works just fine for me in the Safari browser.

Lijit community analyst Tara Anderson recently contacted me to ask how Lijit was working for me, and I described this problem. She replied, “Do you have AdBlock as a plug-in on your Firefox browser? If so, then that will block any results from being returned. There is a workaround — you have to add Lijit into the whitelist of your AdBlock and then it should recognize Lijit as a safe site, allowing the results to be displayed.”

OK, so how do you do that? Tara was kind enough to give me the answer…

Here’s how I made this fix in Firefox for Mac OS X:

Display Adblock Plus on your browser toolbar. Select: View –>Toolbars –> Customize.
When the window pops up with the icons for your add-ons, find the Adblock Plus icon and drag it onto one of your Firefox toolbars. Then click “done.” You should now see a red stop sign-like icon that says “ABP” on your toolbar.
Go to the Lijit site.
While on that site, open the drop-down menu for the ABP icon. Click the “Disable on www.lijit.com” option. Once you do that, you’ll see the ABP logo turn green.

After I followed those steps, I went back to Contentious.com and tried a Lijit search from my site using Firefox. It worked!

…Well, until Lijit resolves the Adblock Plus conflict, this was a simple enough fix — and it makes Lijit search via Firefox work on any site where it’s installed.

Thanks, Tara!

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One Comment

Amy, I’m glad this worked for you. I’m going to use your post as reference for other users who experience the same problem. Our developers are aware of this issue and it’s definitely something we want to get fixed before it becomes a problem for too many more users. Thanks for your patience!

[Reply]

1. Tara Anderson on November 30th, 2007 at 2:58 pm