Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Element Hiding Helper 1.2.3 released · 2012-06-21 17:16 by Wladimir Palant

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blogged on how websites manage to ruin Firefox performance by continuing to do something even though their tab is no longer active — they keep updating the view that you cannot see.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.

To the install page

Element Hiding Helper 1.2.2 released · 2012-04-04 14:57 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.2.2

Changes

Improved the way Element Hiding Helper attaches itself to browser windows (made sure that no browser windows are skipped any more).
The hotkey in Firefox 14 is now Ctrl-Shift-F3 (neither Ctrl-Shift-K nor Ctrl-Shift-S are available any more).
Fixed rule generation for attributes containing backslashes.
Fixed wrong size calculation for some web pages.
Removed special About dialog, displaying the default one now.
Updated to changes in recent Firefox nightlies.

Upcoming and past changes to application compatibility · 2012-03-16 08:02 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with version 2.0 Adblock Plus requires at least Firefox 3.6.13 to be installed (or Thunderbird 3.1.7 or SeaMonkey 2.1). We really don’t support earlier Firefox 3.6 versions because of a critical bug that will cause Flash to break. Unfortunately, this limitation initially couldn’t be enforced by technical means (due to a limitation on addons.mozilla.org) so some people with old Firefox 3.6 versions nevertheless got it installed. If you are one of them: you should update your browser as soon as possible, already because of the numerous known security issues in the old versions.

Random thoughts on democracy and Russian presidential election · 2012-03-12 12:54 by Wladimir Palant

As some of you might know, Russia sort of elected a new old president a week ago. After taking a 4 years break as prime minister Putin now becomes Russian president for the third time. I’ve been following the Russian-language reactions to the election which I find quite interesting. While I like most readers of this blog have the luxury of living in a democracy, sometimes I need a reminder about what actually constitutes a democracy. Hint: elections in regular intervals are not sufficient.

On the pop-up blocker in Adblock Plus · 2012-02-15 18:33 by Wladimir Palant

There is a semi-hidden new feature in Adblock Plus 2.0: a pop-up blocker. I wanted to explain what this feature is about and why there are no big announcements about it.