Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Experimental Adblock Plus for Chrome builds available with better blocking · 2011-09-28 19:20 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.1.4.685 there are two development builds — the “standard” version and the experimental version. The experimental version uses the new webRequest API that allows Adblock Plus to block requests better. Unfortunately, this API isn’t stable yet which means that you need to go to chrome://flags and activate “Experimental Extension APIs” option. Then you will be able to install the experimental build and it will update to new experimental versions automatically.

What you should expect in this build:

All ads blocked, no matter how fast the page loads.
Background images and in-video ads will be blocked (feel free to uncheck “Block ads inside YouTube videos” option, it should no longer be required).

Known issues:

Issues with sites loading images dynamically are not resolved yet, the old blocking mechanism is still active in these builds.
Some false positives possible because Chrome doesn’t distinguish between objects and object subrequests.

Let us know if you see more issues with these builds.

To the install page

Adblock Plus 1.3.10 released · 2011-09-28 10:23 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus 1.3.10

Changes

Added Latvian and Albanian translations.
Fixed some minor issues.
Some users will be asked to complete a survey about Adblock Plus.

Detailed changelog

Known issues

Aktuelle Informationen der ukrainischen Botschaft? So findet man sie! · 2011-09-24 14:55 by Wladimir Palant

This is once again an off-topic blog post about the information policy of the Ukrainian embassy in Germany. Main point is making this information easier to find for Ukrainian citizens who live in Germany which is why it is being published in German and Russian.

Das ist jetzt mal ein Blog-Post, das rein gar nichts mit Adblock Plus zu tun hat. Sinn und Zweck ist lediglich, diese Informationen besser auffindbar zu machen.

Эта статья, в виде исключения, абсолютно не связана с Adblock Plus. Основной смысл ее публикации в том, чтобы эту информацию было немного проще найти.

Diagnostics 1.1.6 for Adblock Plus released · 2011-09-16 15:50 by Wladimir Palant

Diagnostics 1.1.6 has been released. This version only updates compatibility information, it is marked as compatible with all current application versions.

Install Diagnostics 1.1.6 for Adblock Plus

Element Hiding Helper 1.1.2 released · 2011-09-16 14:45 by Wladimir Palant

Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.2

Changes

New icon, also added a large version of the icon (forum topic)
Showing preview is now selected by default (forum topic)
Improved default attribute selection (forum topic)
Corrected handling of whitespace at the end of ID attribute (forum topic)
Removed Lithuanian translation, it is abandoned and unusable (forum topic)

Google Chrome image loading bug finally fixed · 2011-09-16 09:52 by Wladimir Palant

One of the most persistent issues that Adblock Plus is facing in Google Chrome is WebKit bug 45586. It breaks tons of websites, mostly the ones providing image zoom functionality. In short, if Adblock Plus is active this bug prevents the websites from getting the correct image size. And there is absolutely no viable work-around.

On rapid releases and version numbers · 2011-08-19 18:45 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve spent a little too much time arguing about rapid releases and version numbers in a German-language forum. In the end, I think that the benefits of rapid releases outweigh their disadvantages. It is indeed important for Mozilla to bring out new features faster, working more than a year on a release like it happened for Firefox 4 is unacceptable. Seeing Mozilla fall behind on caniuse.com and the like isn’t great, Mozilla shouldn’t become the factor slowing down progress on the web. Also, as an add-on author I like that release dates are predictable now, it allows planning in advance.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™ (Beta) 1.1.4 released · 2011-08-17 12:55 by Wladimir Palant

Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™

Changes

Fixed a minor security issue (reported by Nicholas Carlini from UC Berkley, severity: low)
New extension icon (forum topic)
Added Latvian translation, updated Korean translation
Made icon appear sooner (forum topic)
Fixed “QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR” error if too many filters are used (forum topic)
Added more websites to the list of workarounds for WebKit bug 45586

Details on the resolved Adblock Plus for Chrome security issue · 2011-08-17 12:55 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 1.1.4 for Google Chrome has been released today and fixes a minor security issue. This blog post provides some details.

Binary XPCOM components are dead - js-ctypes is the way to go · 2011-07-12 13:19 by Wladimir Palant

Daniel Glazman is shocked to see how hard shipping binary XPCOM components with an extension became now. Fact is, we simply didn’t notice the hidden message of blog posts announcing dropping binary compatibility (meaning that your component needs to be recompiled for each new Firefox version, no matter how simple it is) and rapid releases — binary XPCOM components in extensions are deprecated. Theoretically, somebody could still continue using them but it requires so much effort that nobody can be expected to do that. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it said like that anywhere, hence this blog post. There is still tons of documentation on binary XPCOM components on MDN and no deprecation warnings. Even XPCOM changes in Gecko 2.0 page lists all the important changes without making any conclusions.