Aug 25, 2010 17:01 GMT  ·  By

Adblock Plus is the most popular extension for Mozilla Firefox and there's hardly a Firefox user than hasn't at least heard of it. But popularity alone doesn't pay the bills, like many, many add-on developers out there, its creator worked on it in his spare time, as a side-project.

That has recently changed as Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has unveiled that he has received a rather generous investment from an anonymous source which will enable him to dedicate entirely to developing Adblock Plus for at least the next couple of years. As a result he has now left his job at Songbird.

That's good news for Adblock Plus fans out there since it means that updates and new features should be coming at a much swifter pace than before, which can only be a good thing.

"A while ago I started talking to somebody who shares my passion for the web and agrees that the current advertising model needs fixing," Wladimir Palant wrote in a blog post announcing the investment and detailing some of the long term plans for the add-on.

"One thing that came out of this: he raised some capital, enough to let me work on Adblock Plus full-time the next two years. And there are also some ideas on how to make the project self-sustained by the time this money runs out," he added.

Even more interesting than the fact that the project will be funded for the next couple of years is the fact that there are plans to monetize Adblock Plus. Normally, this wouldn't bode well for users, but the developer ensures us that whatever path is chosen in this direction, the users won't be affected.

Palant says that he has received several business propositions over the years and has had to turn down all of them, some because they went against the essence of Adblock Plus, and some simply because the developer says he is not a businessman.

With the help of the mystery investor, Palant says he will be able to focus on the code and the project and leave the monetization question to others. However, he says that he is still very much in charge of the whole project and won't do anything to threaten its integrity. [via TechCrunch]

Adblock Plus is available for download here on Softpedia.