Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus · 2011-12-05 12:19 by Wladimir Palant

The development build last Friday introduced a new feature that took many people by surprise: Allowing acceptable ads. Sorry about that, I am usually trying to announce large functionality changes in a timely manner but that didn’t work this time. As of Adblock Plus 2.0b.3277 the current state is:

“Allow non-intrusive advertising” option is enabled by default for all users but the ones using privacy filter lists (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy’s Tracking, Adverisity Privacy). The documentation explains why it has to be enabled by default.
The first-run page notifies users about this change, opt-out works by clicking “Filter Preferences” and unchecking the option there.
On the technical side, this option simply represents an additional filter subscription. The documentation describes how to view this filter subscription or disable the special treatment for it.
There is a forum topic with lots of my replies to questions concerning this feature.

Other changes since the previous announcement:

Filter search is now possible in the Filter Preferences.
“Collapse blocked elements” option has been renamed into “Hide placeholders of blocked elements”.
“Count filter hits” is now a visible option.
Added “Reset hit statistics” filter action.
Added warning for filter subscriptions requiring a newer Adblock Plus version.
Updating all filter subscriptions is now possible using Ctrl-Shift-T keyboard shortcut (not visible in the user interface).
Fixed: Filter groups should also have “Show/hide filters” in their Actions menu.
Fixed: ABP menu still has the old “Preferences” menu item.
Fixed: Dragging a filter subscription might display as a button or menu being dragged.

To the install page

New Filter Preferences dialog and more · 2011-12-01 17:25 by Wladimir Palant

Huge changes that were living on the “experimental” branch just landed, we are now in the Beta phase for Adblock Plus 2.0. The most notable changes in Adblock Plus 2.0b.3255:

New Filter Preferences dialog replaces the old Preferences dialog and hopefully makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
Custom filter groups can be created, you are no longer limited by the groups created automatically.
Filter groups can contain multiple instances of the same filter (most importantly comments).
Filter subscription is now added automatically on startup, the user no longer needs to confirm (but can easily revert the decision).
The new Backup and Restore functionality allows exporting all filter data as well as custom filters only. The latter is identical to the old Import/Export but will restore filter groups.

While this functionality is finally usable we are not done yet. There are multiple known issues, most of them should be fixed over the course of the next few days:

Resetting hit counts isn’t possible yet.
Searching filters isn’t possible yet.
There is no warning message if the filter subscription requires a newer Adblock Plus version.
Filter actions and “Add filter” don’t appear disabled even when they are unavailable.
Creating filters via filter composer will create a new special filter group even when user-defined groups are available.
Filter editor ignores Home and End keys (not sure whether this can be fixed).
Actions executed on many filters (delete or remove) might take too long.

Some things that won’t change:

Enter key closes the Filter Preferences dialog, F2 has to be used to start editing a filter.
Filter editor no longer has a Close button.

If you find something else, please comment here or report a bug.

To the install page

Google Chrome and pre-installed web apps · 2011-11-15 09:47 by Wladimir Palant

Google recently launched a redesigned version of its Web Store where one can install extensions and web apps. One particular feature caught my attention: it marks the extensions that you already have with a check mark. How does the web page know which extensions you have installed?

EU MozCamp, theme development, add-on localization with adofex · 2011-11-13 18:17 by Wladimir Palant

I’m still at the EU MozCamp 2011 but Mitchell Baker already gave her closing speech and things are wrapping up. It has been an interesting weekend, a bunch of add-on related sessions among other things. One interesting conclusion that I made from the discussion: the rapid releases aren’t a real issue for extension developers and don’t create more work. Ok, I’ve suspected that much already but it was nice to have other add-on authors confirm this. In the discussion session with extension developers this topic didn’t even come up, as opposed to localization for example which is a significant pain point. AMO’s automated compatibility checks for extensions are working nicely and mark most add-ons as compatible already during the Aurora phase. There are plans that go beyond that as well and it sounds like extension compatibility will mostly become a non-issue for end users in a few Firefox releases (at least as long as binary XPCOM components aren’t used).

Diagnostics 1.1.7 for Adblock Plus released · 2011-11-12 13:01 by Wladimir Palant

Diagnostics 1.1.7 has been released. This version fixes a compatibility issue with Firefox 8.

Install Diagnostics 1.1.7 for Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 2] · 2011-11-07 15:03 by Wladimir Palant

Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions. Now we want to look at questions about Adblock Plus functionality.

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 1] · 2011-11-07 12:18 by Wladimir Palant

The previous blog post explains how we implemented the survey, now it is time to start analyzing the results (sorry about keeping you waiting). Here we want to look at the results of the first page where we asked general questions, mainly to get an idea of who is responding and to allow segmentation of the results. By now we have 1552 completed submissions. The number of answers is slightly different for each question however — all answers were optional and we had to throw out some answers because they were clearly invalid.

Tags: adblock plus

Better "Add filter" dialog · 2011-11-05 00:50 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.1.4.719 features an improved “Add filters” dialog that webpage can no longer mess with. This allowed implementing two long-standing requests:

Filters can be modified before adding.
The dialog buttons can be triggered with Enter and Esc keys (use Shift-Enter to insert a newline into the list).

Dragging the window around is still somewhat awkward (displayed mouse cursor doesn’t match the action, window sometimes won’t follow) but other than that it seems to work fine.

In other news:

If Adblock Plus fails to “remember” your filter subscriptions, that’s Chrome issue 103018. Removing the directory “LOCALAPPDATA\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System\Origins” restores normal functionality. Current development builds will automatically re-add default subscriptions on data loss (a lame workaround but the only one possible it seems).
Support for abp: links has been added yesterday so that the “Subscribe” links on the subscriptions page can be used now.

To the install page

Tags: adblock plus chrome development builds

Improved data format in Chrome · 2011-10-26 10:21 by Wladimir Palant

Note: The changes described here caused a critical regression in the non-experimental builds (blocking essentially disabled), sorry about that. This issue has been fixed in Adblock Plus 1.1.4.708.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.1.4.705 underwent a major rearchitecturing effort. Main goal was to use the same data format as Adblock Plus in Firefox, a number of other areas have been touched as well. The expected changes:

Google Chrome 9 and above is required now (previously Google Chrome 6 was still supported, at least theoretically).
Local Storage now only contains options, the actual filter data is stored in files on disk. One side-effect of this change is that quota-related errors should be gone. Locating the files on disk isn’t trivial but they can be viewed under filesystem:chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/persistent/ in the browser (filesystem:chrome-extension://cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb/persistent/ for the release version). File format is identical to patterns.ini in Firefox.
There should no longer be hangs when some user interface features are used. If you still see a hang after some button is clicked or similar please let us know.
Downloading of filter subscriptions works the same as in Firefox now. This means among other things that EasyList downloads will be distributed to the various mirrors instead of being limited to the main download mirror. Only limitation: filter subscriptions that change location by means of an HTTP redirect (301) cannot be recognized.
Some improvements to the Options user interface have been implemented. This is most noticeable in “Filter lists” tab: it now only displays the subscriptions that have been added. More subscriptions can be added by clicking “Add filter subscription” – this works same as in Firefox now, also the list of recommendations is identical (recommendations matching browser’s user interface locale are highlighted).
Messaging around “Easy create filter” feature has been simplified. There should be no visible effects of this change.

If you notice that something doesn’t work as expected please let us know.

To the install page

Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 0] · 2011-10-10 10:43 by Wladimir Palant

Please note that this will be the only post to be syndicated to Planet Mozilla, the other parts of this series will appear in my blog only — I can imagine that most readers of Planet have very little interest in what I am writing here. If you are interested in the full analysis of the results, please visit my blog in a few days.

At the moment we have 1360 responses to the user survey which is more than enough to start analyzing the results. There will be some more responses before the survey ends but we don’t expect to get much more than 1500 responses and the overall results shouldn’t change significantly.