Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

Ethics of blocking ads - Part 3 · 2006-12-04 12:50 by Wladimir Palant

This article continues the discussion on ethical implications of ad blocking software. The first part and the second part were mostly dedicated to ads as a business model, now we want to look at the ads as part of the customer relationship.

No good deed goes unpunished · 2006-12-04 00:19 by Wladimir Palant

I started a little experiment — downloaded all extensions from addons.mozilla.org (AMO), unpacked them and tried to find security holes by searching for specific strings. As expected, it wasn’t all too difficult, one can easily find a dozen vulnerable extensions in an hour, and that not even accounting for the fact that there is a certain unpopular class of extensions on AMO all sharing the same buggy code. The only reason I didn’t hit all too many high profile extensions was that I was going through the extensions in alphabetical order instead of going by popularity.

Sorry Filterset.G but it is time for you to go · 2006-11-23 18:05 by Wladimir Palant

The issues with Filterset.G have been discussed several times in the forums and now it is official — I recommend Adblock Plus users to uninstall Filterset.G Updater and use some other subscription instead.

What happened to the promised spam solution? · 2006-11-23 17:35 by Wladimir Palant

Do you still remember? Sometime in the beginning of year 2004 Bill Gates promised us to take care of the spam problem by 2006. It was big in the news all over the world.

Hit counts for element hiding revisited · 2006-11-21 17:48 by Wladimir Palant

I was finally able to come up with a working (yet not exactly simple) scheme to implement hit counts for element hiding. It can also be used to show hidden elements in the sidebar and maybe even make element hiding rules respect whitelisting. There are two disadvantages however:

It is good to be right - we are No. 1! · 2006-11-21 12:29 by Wladimir Palant

December last year I had a discussion with rue, maintainer of the original Adblock extension. We were talking about the the necessity of major changes, and I was trying to convince him that these changes are long overdue. At some point rue proudly proclaimed something like: “We stayed in the Top5 for the last year — not bad considering we didn’t have any changes at all”. My answer was: “That’s not an achievement, this project has the potential to be No. 1”. And there we are, less than a year later — Adblock Plus is now the most popular extension on Addons.Mozilla.Org. It is good to be right, I knew it was possible!

What should happen to the mailing list? · 2006-11-17 02:24 by Wladimir Palant

I am seriously considering killing Adblock Plus mailing list. It receives several spam mails every day that I have to remove from the queue. The real traffic on the mailing list is very low if compared to what I get as Bugzilla reports, blog comments or private mails (and I don’t want to even try comparing it to the forum traffic).

Moving to Germany · 2006-11-11 03:03 by Wladimir Palant

I just came back from Germany a few days ago and now (in a few hours) I am going there again. This came quite unexpectedly, I didn’t know myself until two days ago. This time I will stay in Darmstadt for a few months, working with the guys at the university and hopefully producing something useful together. I should come back to Oslo in the beginning of March to finish my PhD thesis — plan is to be all done before May. That’s some crazy time coming up…