Adblock Plus and (a little) more

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.

We are back · 2012-02-09 16:04 by Wladimir Palant

As you probably noticed, the distribution update yesterday didn’t go as planned. For some reason, the new operating system confused the virtual server manager enough that it refused to start the server again. And since that issue couldn’t be resolved on our side fixing it took a while. Now the system has been restored from backup, I then applied my personal backup (because the hosting provider could only restore an old backup for reasons I’m unable to understand) and now we are only missing a few days worth of issue reports and probably a few forum posts from yesterday’s morning (roughly one hour between my backup and the start of the downtime).

Possible downtime on Wednesday · 2012-02-07 09:55 by Wladimir Palant

I will try to update the Linux distribution on adblockplus.org tomorrow (Wednesday), starting at around 8 AM CET. With some luck the server will only go down for a few seconds for a reboot. Obviously, there is some risk of an extended downtime but I hope that this time the backups will allow restoring service soon if something goes wrong. easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org (filter list downloads) will not be affected but everything else on the adblockplus.org domain (including EasyList homepage) will be.