Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Deutsche Übersetzung von adblockplus.org endlich (fast) komplett · 2006-09-01 17:28 by Wladimir Palant

For those not speaking German: this is the announcement that the German translation of adblockplus.org is finally complete.

Eine gute Nachricht für alle deutschsprachigen Besucher von adblockplus.org: die deutsche Version der Seite ist endlich komplett. Ausnahmen sind lediglich die Dokumentation der nsIAdblockPlus-Schnittstelle, die nicht übersetzt werden sollte, und Änderungslisten für ältere Versionen — diese sollten auch irgendwann übersetzt werden.

Adblock Plus 0.7.2 is going to be great! · 2006-08-23 19:59 by Wladimir Palant

For some reason the last two days have been very productive — I found solutions for three basic problems that have been bugging me for quite a while.

But first of all I have to admit my stupidity. I added “immediate unblocking” to “long term plans” because I thought that it would require changes in Gecko. Then I found out that Gecko already had something like what I was thinking about, yet getting it to work correctly would take some time (that’s when I added this feature to the plans for the next release, with a question mark). And only now I finally saw the obvious solution — in order to make something run through the content policies again you have to remove it from the document and then re-add.

And we proudly present: The Deregifier! · 2006-08-23 00:26 by Wladimir Palant

After years of regexp mania we now have to go back to simple filters — starting with Adblock Plus 0.7 those are more efficient than regular expressions. This doesn’t mean that regular expressions got any slower, it’s that simple filters got very fast. There are also other advantages a dozen simple filters have over one long regexp. They are simply easier to read, “effective filter” in the blockable items tooltips presents more relevant information (one rule instead of the whole regexp), we get hit counts for every filter that is also more relevant, and we can deativate every simple filter separately if it causes problems.

Investigating filter matching algorithms · 2006-08-22 20:02 by Wladimir Palant

Warning: dense computer science talk ahead. Proceed at your own risk!

This is the story behind improving the performance of Adblock’s most important component — filter matching. The problem is the following: we have a set F consisting of f filters, we have a string (an address) S of length n, and we need to know whether this string matches any of the filters. If it does, we need to block the element associated with this address. And we should decide really soon because there are a few hundred more of those addresses to be tested and the user is waiting impatiently.

Speaking of respecting users... · 2006-08-20 23:36 by Wladimir Palant

When you go to Adblock’s (not Adblock Plus) web site — what strikes you most? Is it MozDev’s cool design? Or is it the great description of things you can do with Adblock? I bet that’s not what you notice. I am almost sure that you stare at the text and swear: “Who the hell put grey text on white background? How are we supposed to read this?”

New web tools for Adblock Plus · 2006-08-20 01:27 by Wladimir Palant

I opened a new web site section called Web tools where I put the three web-based tools for Adblock Plus users I wrote recently.

Adblock Plus 0.7.1.2 released · 2006-08-18 03:14 by Wladimir Palant

Major changes

Translations added: Czech, Norwegian (Bokmål), Greek, Ukrainian
The new abp: protocol scheme allows adding a subscription with two clicks
Preferences dialog: Improved inline editor’s compatibility with various themes
Fixed: Installation in SeaMonkey on Linux sets wrong file permissions

Two new translations added · 2006-08-17 22:31 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Translations added: Greek, Ukrainian

Known issues

~~abp: links not UTF-8 encoding are not accepted~~

Documentation for Yahoo Mail crashes · 2006-08-15 23:16 by Wladimir Palant

People still complain frequently that their browser crashes on Yahoo Mail so I thought sending them to a (not very clearly formulated) forum post wouldn’t be the best thing to do. I wrote some text describing the problem and how it can be solved.

Adding filter subscriptions with two clicks · 2006-08-15 14:28 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

The new abp: protocol scheme allows subscribing with two clicks using links like the following: Subscribe to EasyList