That was fast! Adblock Plus gets one over Facebook again

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it would sidestep ad-blocking software in order to serve ads to users.

The social network justified the move by claiming it now offered better ad designs and more advanced ad controls.

“We’ve designed our ad formats, ad performance and controls to address the underlying reasons people have turned to ad blocking software. When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads. As we offer people more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software,” the social network explained at the time.

But the reasoning didn’t sit well with popular service AdBlock Plus, who labelled the move “anti-user”.

Now, the underdog has revealed that the cat and mouse game is currently in their favour.

Related: Facebook to circumvent ad-blocking software on desktop, because ‘choice’

“We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon, and, frankly, they’ve beaten even our own expectations. A new filter was added to the main EasyList about 15 minutes ago,” AdBlock Plus wrote on its blog.

Users can either wait for the filter lists to be automatically updated or manually update it using the text string on the blog.

“Facebook might ‘re-circumvent’ at any time. As we wrote in the previous post, this sort of back-and-forth battle between the open source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s very possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless — at any time. If that happens, the ad-blocking community will likely find another workaround, then Facebook might circumvent again, etc,” the service explained.

AdBlock Plus also cautioned that the workaround hasn’t been heavily tested yet.

“But for this round of the cat-and-mouse contest, looks like the mouse won.”