Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Customizations 1.0.1 for Adblock Plus released · 2012-06-28 22:20 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Updated for Adblock Plus 2.1
- Added option to change display of “Non-intrusive ads” filter list
- Removed “Remove Enabled checkbox label” option, Adblock Plus no longer displays that label
Adblock Plus 2.1 released · 2012-06-28 17:53 by Wladimir Palant
- Adblock Plus can be installed without restarting the browser now.
- Added support for Firefox Mobile 14.
- Improved Thunderbird integration.
- Updated for upcoming Firefox releases (especially Firefox 15).
Where did the Adblock Plus unit tests go? · 2012-06-23 17:13 by Wladimir Palant
You probably asked yourself already what happened to the Adblock Plus unit tests. What? You didn’t? You don’t even know what unit tests are? Oops… Sorry about having bothered you. I guess nobody is reading past this point but I just have to explain it nevertheless.
Adblock Plus 2.1 release candidate available - restartless edition · 2012-06-23 16:47 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus can finally be installed/disabled/enabled without a browser restart. This feature took much longer to develop than expected and there were a bunch of glitches when it first hit the development builds but most of these seem to be resolved now. So the current development build (Adblock Plus 2.1rc.3495) is a release candidate. Adblock Plus 2.1 is expected to be released on Wednesday (June 27th).
Important changes
- Installing, uninstalling, updating the extension no longer requires you to restart the browser. Note that you will have to restart the browser when updating from a non-restartless version of Adblock Plus.
- Adblock Plus should no longer be affected by misbehaving extensions.
- Better Thunderbird support, Adblock Plus is now usable in tabs displaying web pages as well.
- Added support for Firefox Mobile with native UI (next Firefox Mobile version currently in Beta).
- Made our toolbar/addon bar button more reliable: it will no longer disappear if the toolbar is customized when Adblock Plus is disabled and it will remember its previous position if removed.
- The development builds work reliably in Firefox 15 and above – there were several changes that affected Adblock Plus (especially bug 650353).
- A new filter type has been implemented: element hiding exceptions (forum topic). These are mostly useful for authors of complementary filter subscriptions that need to restrict an overly general filter from the main subscription. Everybody else can just edit the original filter instead.
- Filter subscriptions are automatically updated when reporting a false positive (forum topic).
- Filter subscriptions can set a fixed title for themselves using the
! Titlecomment (forum topic). This also allows us to display subscription titles in bold now. - Filter Preferences: “Enabled” checkboxes have been moved to the left, italics are no longer used for disabled filters (forum topic).
- Filter Preferences: Links in the subscription list now have the same color as the rest of the text to prevent them from being indistinguishable from the background (forum topic).
- The shortcut key for blockable items will be Ctrl-Shift-U in Firefox 15 and above. Sorry but our beloved Ctrl-Shift-V key is otherwise occupied.
- Our custom About dialog is gone, Adblock Plus is using the built-in dialog now.
Known issues
- Package size increased considerably. This is a side-effect of different packaging approach which is recommended starting with Firefox 4 to improve startup performance (no inner JAR file).
- The development builds are no longer signed and neither will be the final release. This is due to bug 765676.
- Firefox Mobile with XUL-based UI (meaning the currently stable Firefox Mobile release) is no longer supported. Unfortunately, it seems to have a bug that will cause random issues when a restartless extension is updated. From what I can tell, we cannot work around it and it is unlikely to be fixed either with this particular Firefox Mobile variant nearing its end of life. You will have to continue using Adblock Plus 2.0.3 here.
- Disabling Adblock Plus extension during a browsing session doesn’t release all memory used by it, some memory remains allocated until you reload all pages that had element hiding rules applied to them. This is unfortunately unavoidable, the effect is rather small however (around 0.5 MB in my tests but might depend on the number of open tabs).
- The “Contribute” button will appear again even if you removed it earlier in a non-restartless Adblock Plus version. Also, the blockable items height will be reset. This is unfortunately unavoidable, these choices have to be stored differently now that the extension is restartless.
- Toolbar icon position is supposed to be kept when updating from a non-restartless Adblock Plus version, there were reports however that it isn’t working. I will look into it, in the meantime just customize the toolbar again and move the icon wherever you would like to have it.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2.3 released · 2012-06-21 17:16 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.2.3
This version has been updated for upcoming Inspector changes in Firefox 14, the “Hide with ABP” button is being displayed again.
Diagnostics 1.2.2 for Adblock Plus released · 2012-06-21 17:09 by Wladimir Palant
Install Diagnostics 1.2.2 for Adblock Plus
Changes
- Updated for upcoming changes in Adblock Plus 2.1.
- The hotkey in Firefox 15 is now Ctrl-Shift-F4 (Ctrl-Shift-M is now triggering “Responsive Design View”)
- Browser’s default About dialog is now used instead of an extension-defined one.
Closed my LinkedIn account · 2012-06-08 16:30 by Wladimir Palant
A bunch of posts on Planet Mozilla reminded me that there is still one social network that I am a member of. So it was time to reconsider whether having a LinkedIn account was worth it.
Preventing background tabs from wasting your computer's resources · 2012-05-12 13:27 by Wladimir Palant
Taras recently blogged on how websites manage to ruin Firefox performance by continuing to do something even though their tab is no longer active — they keep updating the view that you cannot see. He wondered whether it would be possible to suspend these tabs from an extension. I looked into this and there is a way to suspend all timeouts for a tab — something that an extension could use. Getting the details right wasn’t quite trivial but I think that my extension gets it right now: Suspend background tabs. Enjoy!
Using asynchronous file I/O in Gecko · 2012-04-05 20:38 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve finally decided to start using asynchronous file I/O in Adblock Plus (probably about time). I didn’t expect this to be too complicated, mostly messy because of all the callbacks. Well, I was mistaken. I will write down what I figured out, this might help somebody.
Asynchronous file operations, end of support for old browsers · 2012-04-05 16:28 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0.4b.3443 reading and saving of patterns.ini and elemhide.css files will be asynchronous (meaning that they won’t delay other operations that Firefox or Adblock Plus might need to do). This approach has a bunch of advantages:
- Firefox startup and shutdown will be faster.
- Adblock Plus Preferences will be more responsive, changing something will no longer cause the browser to hang for a split second.
- The inherently unreliable cache.js file is no longer necessary and will not be used.
There are also some drawbacks which is why it took so long to make this decision:
- First browser window might appear before Adblock Plus managed to read its filters. If that happens, the web pages from the restored session (or the homepage) might have ads. This never happened in my testing but it is possible.
- patterns.ini is no longer saved on browser shutdown, some hit count information might get lost because of that (up to 250 hits).
Known issues (should be fixed soon):
- When updating from an earlier Adblock Plus version, the first-run page might open. Your settings will not be changed.
- Writing elemhide.css might fail in some rare scenarios.
In other news, support for anything before Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8 and SeaMonkey 2.5 has been dropped. I started cleaning up our code using the new platform capabilities and will continue doing so. Also, a work-around for the subscription download issue in Firefox 14 has been implemented.