Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Diagnostics for Adblock Plus: the restartless edition · 2012-01-02 10:51 by Wladimir Palant
Creating extensions that can be installed, uninstalled and updated without a browser restart used to be very painful but got a whole lot easier with Firefox 8. I am now making all my add-ons restartless, Diagnostics for Adblock Plus is the first try. The current development build (Diagnostics 1.2b.156) should work exactly like the previous versions but e.g. disable immediately if you click the corresponding button in the Add-ons Manager. Reasonably new browser versions are required (at least Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8, SeaMonkey 2.5), old versions are no longer supported.
Customizations 1.0 for Adblock Plus released · 2011-12-27 18:40 by Wladimir Palant
This is the first Customizations for Adblock Plus release. This extension provides a collection of semi-supported user interface tweaks for Adblock Plus. It can be installed without restarting the browser — easy to try. More information
First Customizations for Adblock Plus development builds · 2011-12-22 18:51 by Wladimir Palant
Customizations for Adblock Plus is a new extension providing some advanced semi-supported customization options. The goal is to make the customizations such as the ones described in the FAQ more comfortable and easier to try. The extension installs without requiring a browser restart, clicking the Options button in the Add-ons Manager shows the available options. Right now we have:
- Vertical layout for Filter Preferences (filters below subscriptions)
- Some more options for Filter Preferences to save space
- Toolbar icon display configuration (text and/or icon)
- Removing Adblock Plus from all browser menus
- Two hidden Adblock Plus options (left-click action for the toolbar icon and default selection for the Filter Composer)
Adblock Plus 2.0.2 released · 2011-12-21 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
- Improved texts describing “non-intrusive ads” feature.
- Made toolbar icon properly customizable in Thunderbird.
- Fixed: Filter editing is broken in Firefox 3.6.
- Firefox Mobile: Fixed user interface to handle “non-intrusive ads” feature properly.
Random thought on communities · 2011-12-15 23:46 by Wladimir Palant
Being in charge of a popular project has its highs and lows. On the one hand, creating something that is used by many people can be highly rewarding. You have a large community that supports you, there are many people willing to do their part. But then there are times when an unpopular change needs to be done, and as your community grows almost any change will make you unpopular with somebody. All the sudden you get people yelling at you — lots of people suddenly need to tell you how stupid that change is and what you should have done instead. It’s highly demotivating and makes you want to avoid uncomfortable changes. But that’s a dead end leading to a dead project.
Few words from the first employee · 2011-12-15 20:27 by Andrey Novikov
Thank you for the warm welcome. I am very glad to join the great team developing the world’s most popular plug-in. As Wladimir mentioned my first task is to refine user interface of Adblock Plus for Chrome.
Adblock Plus 2.0.1 released · 2011-12-14 11:57 by Wladimir Palant
This release is fixing a few minor issues compared to Adblock Plus 2.0. Main reason for the release is a change to the compatibility information.
Adblock Plus 2.0 released · 2011-12-13 16:59 by Wladimir Palant
Major changes
- Experimental pop-up blocking support for the cases where the built-in pop-up blocker fails.
- New Filter Preferences dialog makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
- Custom filters can be organized into any number of filter groups.
- Backup and Restore functionality allows creating a copy of all filter preferences, not just custom filters.
- Added “Allow non-intrusive advertising” setting (can be changed in Filter Preferences, documentation).
Please welcome our first employee: Andrey Novikov · 2011-12-09 21:11 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I explained why we changed our policy on donations. This worked out and we were able to hire our first employee: Andrey Novikov. Andrey comes from a web development and server administration background, he is also the developer of the Androzic app for Android-based mobile phones. For now he is working on Adblock Plus for Chrome and already added proper recognition of third-party domains (something that only few people will notice but nevertheless important to bring our Chrome extension on par with the Firefox version). Next task on his list: porting user interface from Adblock Plus for Firefox to Chrome.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 4] · 2011-12-09 15:58 by Wladimir Palant
The previous part analyzed the last page of the survey where people replied on the role of Adblock Plus on the web. Of course, it would also be interesting to see whether the results are different depending on which group of survey respondents you look. I analyzed the last page for each of the survey languages separately and I’ve also created a separate analysis for “newbies” — people who said that they were using Firefox for less than one year. I’ll just publish the results here without commenting.