Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Diagnostics 1.2.1 for Adblock Plus released · 2012-01-26 12:54 by Wladimir Palant
Install Diagnostics 1.2.1 for Adblock Plus
I discovered bug 721319 causing memory leaks in most of my restartless extensions. The new release works around the issue now.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2.1 released · 2012-01-26 12:51 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.2.1
I discovered bug 721319 causing memory leaks in most of my restartless extensions. The new release works around the issue now.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2 released · 2012-01-25 14:54 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.2
Changes
- Can be installed/uninstalled/disabled without a browser restart now.
- Added Page Inspector integration (new feature coming up in Firefox 10).
- Stopped warning about missing Adblock Plus installation.
- Fixed: Starting from the Tools Adblock Plus menu is possible now.
- Fixed: Content Security Policy can no longer prevent preview from working on some websites.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2 release candidate available · 2012-01-21 19:26 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.2rc.382 is a release candidate for Element Hiding Helper 1.2. After the previous announcement it went through some major architectural simplifications, there shouldn’t be any visible changes however. Also, many translations have been updated already so that the Page Inspector button will be localized.
The future of Element Hiding Helper · 2012-01-19 12:08 by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus roadmap currently has a bullet point “Integrate Element Hiding Helper into Adblock Plus”. After adding Page Inspector support to Element Hiding Helper today I think that I’m confident about what exactly will be integrated there.
Using Page Inspector in Firefox 10 and higher to hide elements · 2012-01-19 11:51 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 10 will introduce a new Page Inspector feature, you can read more about it here. This feature allows selecting elements a lot better than the current Element Hiding Helper. You can either right click an element and choose “Inspect Element” – the element will be selected in the Inspector and you will be able to click up/down in the hierarchy line at the bottom. Or you can choose “Inspect” from the Web Developer menu, this will let you select an element similarly to how you would do it with Element Hiding Helper. Once you click an element the selection is fixed, you can click the “Inspect” button to continue selecting. Starting with Firefox 11 there will also be a very impressive 3D View, something that was previously provided by the Tilt extension.
Element Hiding Helper 1.2b.372 will now add an “Hide with ABP” button to the inspector toolbar. This allows you to select an element with the Page Inspector and then click this button to open rule composer. If you use a pre-release Firefox version — please test this feature. Element Hiding Helper 1.2 should be released in a week, in time for Firefox 10 release.
In other news, all issues related to making Element Hiding Helper restartless should have been resolved by now. If you experience any issues, please comment in this post or create a forum topic.
Faster extension development cycle: install changes automatically · 2012-01-13 16:33 by Wladimir Palant
The usual extension development cycle is less than optimal: change something, create a new extension build, install it in the browser (gonna love warnings), restart the browser, finally test it. I don’t like repeating this cycle all the time and so in the past years I’ve been using a test environment in which most extension files are loaded directly from my source code checkout (thanks to a manipulated chrome.manifest file). With this test environment many changes could be tested by simply reopening the extension window, for others you would restart the browser.
Adblock Plus 1.2 (Beta) for Google Chrome™ released · 2012-01-10 11:44 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™
Major changes
- Better blocking thanks to webRequest API (requires in Chrome 17).
- Changed user interface for filter subscription management (an intermediate step towards porting our Firefox user interface).
- Improved “Add filter” dialog, safe from being manipulated by the web page and with filter editing.
- Filter data is being stored using File System API, file format identical to Firefox.
- Using the same algorithm for filter subscription updates as in Firefox (proper handling of expiration intervals, download mirrors etc).
- Added support for subscribing from web pages via
abp:links. - Proper handling of
$third-partyfilter options, top-level domains like co.uk are now being considered. - No longer putting all our element hiding rules into the document’s DOM.