Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 3] · 2011-12-09 15:41 by Wladimir Palant
Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions, Adblock Plus functionality. Now we want to look at how people perceive the role of Adblock Plus on the web. This was the last page of the survey.
Release candidate for Adblock Plus 2.0 available · 2011-12-09 13:54 by Wladimir Palant
All the necessary changes are done and the development builds starting with Adblock Plus 2.0rc.3323 are release candidates for Adblock Plus 2.0. If everything goes well it will be released on Monday.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Adblock Plus options are now displayed directly on its page in Add-ons Manager (in Firefox 7 and above, in older versions the Options button opens toolbar icon’s menu).
- Changed the way the toolbar icon is being hidden, now it can always be brought back via toolbar customization.
- Status bar icon is no longer being displayed in Firefox version with add-on bar (there is no real status bar).
- List of blockable items can now be searched both by localized type name as well as by the corresponding filter option (forum topic).
- When recommended subscriptions are being added the language no longer becomes part of the subscription title.
- An “Adblock Plus” menu has been added to the classic Tools menu for reasons of keyboard accessibility, the Adblock Plus menu entry in the View menu has been removed.
- Added a warning if a subscription contains disabled filters (forum topic).
- Fixed: Don’t create new filter groups for filters being added if a user-defined group is already available (forum topic).
- Fixed: Using context menu prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
- Lots of polishing, especially on the new Filter Preferences dialog.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.4 released · 2011-12-08 14:50 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.4
Previous release had a bug which caused it to malfunction in Firefox versions before Firefox 10. This has been corrected now.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.3 released · 2011-12-08 10:22 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.3
Changes
- Fixed: Element selector prevents a memory compartment from being released (forum topic).
- Fixed: Some websites display their content on top of element markers.