Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus on the crossroads · 2006-12-21 15:09 by Wladimir Palant
Now that Adblock Plus has reached a certain level of maturity and made it to rank 1 by downloads on AMO, there is a question about how it should be developed further. Incremental improvements will continue of course, there are still nice things to be added (the ability to unblock immediately above all). But Adblock Plus has reached a point where it already has most of the features that the general public needs. Most new features will become available as separate extensions.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 and impact on addon downloads · 2006-12-21 01:30 by Wladimir Palant
I am looking at the development of addon downloads on Addons.Mozilla.Org for the last few days and I really have trouble understanding it:
Looking for a job again · 2006-12-20 13:15 by Wladimir Palant
I should be finished with my PhD in May. What should I do once I am done? This question is bugging me right now. These three years have made it very clear that I don’t want to continue an academic career. I want to produce good software that will be used by real people, and sadly this is simply unrealistic being at a university.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 is out - yay! · 2006-12-20 11:17 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 2.0.0.1 has just been released. Please upgrade as soon as possible, it fixes a bad JavaScript bug in Firefox 2.0 that caused all sorts of strange effects especially when Adblock Plus was installed (bug 355161). In particular this fixes the incompatibility between Adblock Plus and the Google Notebook extension and probably a number of other issues that couldn’t be tracked down properly.
Spell checker rants · 2006-12-11 14:21 by Wladimir Palant
The spell checker in Firefox 2 is certainly a great feature. I have already seen lots of people write this and I agree. And yet, it has some certain deficiencies that make me use it far less than it could be. The reason is: it seems to assume that you always write your texts in the same language. Yet I am frequently switching between languages, I write texts in English, German and Russian all the time. And going to the context menu, digging into the languages menu and choosing the right language is just annoying, especially for a short text. There is also another issue: switching languages takes a while, and for a huge dictionary like the German (10 MB) it becomes a major annoyance.
Adblock Plus 0.7.2.3 released · 2006-12-11 04:07 by Wladimir Palant
Major changes
- Added Persian translation
- Fixed major security issue in SeaMonkey
- Made sure “Show tabs on Flash and Java” works without JavaScript again
- “Disable Adblock Plus on …” options are no longer disabled when Preferences dialog is open
Known issues
- Adblock Plus triggers a bug in Firefox 2.0 causing some extensions (e.g. Google Notebook) and websites to break. Firefox 2.0.0.1 will fix this.
Some progress on the object tabs again · 2006-12-08 14:52 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Added Persian translation
- Made it harder for web sites to tamper with object tabs
- Whitelisting options (“Disable Adblock Plus on …”) no longer disabled when Preferences dialog is open
- Added methods addPatterns() and removePatterns() to the public nsIAdblockPlus interface (to be used from other extensions)
Improved security in SeaMonkey · 2006-12-07 19:29 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- SeaMonkey: Switched on a security setting that isn’t used by default for some reason
Optimized storage of internal data · 2006-12-06 16:06 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Made tab displayed by “Show tabs on Flash and Java” a link (because of the context menu and ability to middle-click, bug 15638)
- “Show tabs on Flash and Java” can be used without JavaScript again (bug 15637)
- Made sure that web pages constantly reloading images won’t increase required memory (bug 15317)
- No longer relying on extension version reported by the browser (is unreliable in SeaMonkey, forum thread)
- Firefox: Adblock Plus icon shows up at the right edge of the navigation toolbar by default (forum thread)
- Increased maxVersion for Songbird to 0.3
- Removed obsolete file property from install manifest (not required for Firefox 1.5 and higher)
- No longer using event handler for data storage (bug 15758)
- Using Gecko’s built-in feature for scrolling to node when selecting in the sidebar — should be less error-prone
- Improved check for objects opened on its own (tabs shouldn’t be shown for these objects)
Adblock Plus internals documented · 2006-12-04 18:57 by Wladimir Palant
I finally came to extending the Adblock Plus internals section of the FAQ. So if you need an explanation about which filters are faster and why or how often Adblock Plus really downloads subscriptions — that’s where you look. It also explains how blocking of addresses or element hiding work internally and gives some tips for extension developers.