Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Donations policy change · 2011-05-04 18:01 by Wladimir Palant
It has been eight months since Adblock Plus changed from a hobby project to a full-time employment for me. The other person employed in the project is Till who you might know from the forums and who is responsible for our business development. Unfortunately, despite the help I am getting from Till and the numerous volunteers there is a noticeable resources shortage in the project that is slowing down Adblock Plus development.
New round of AMO's performance tests (2011-04-16) · 2011-04-17 17:42 by Wladimir Palant
I uploaded the overview for the new round of AMO‘s performance tests. The bug that skewed most Windows results so far has been fixed, so the results are more usable now.
Do JavaScript proxies allow undetectable function wrappers? · 2011-04-15 18:13 by Wladimir Palant
I am looking into whether an extension can use JavaScript proxies to do something similar to the built-in pop-up blocker since the built-in pop-up blocker uses a fixed logic that cannot be extended. The goal is to wrap window.open method to verify that any calls are “legit”. Unfortunately, no matter what I try the webpage is able to detect that it is dealing with a proxy and not the real function.
The wrong way of allowing users to make informed decisions · 2011-04-13 15:15 by Wladimir Palant
One point I probably didn’t stress often enough in my previous blog posts on AMO‘s add-on performance measurements is how poorly percentages reflect the real effect of add-ons. At least I see no indication that the people responsible for this campaign intend to change their mind and provide users with more accurate information. Please allow me to explain once again why these numbers are misleading (bug 648742 reworded).
Overview for Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-11 16:55 by Wladimir Palant
I got tired of digging through logs so I created an overview page for AMO’s add-on performance testing results. This shows both the absolute slowdown values as well as percentages for each operating system, along with a link to the corresponding logs. It also shows the standard deviation for each test and flags results that are affected by issues known so far.
Overview of my bug reports on add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-09 19:52 by Wladimir Palant
In a comment to my previous blog post Jorge Villalobos asked me to file bugs on everything I think is wrong with the add-on performance measurements. So that’s what I did. The resulting list is long and I didn’t feel like creating a tracking bug so I better list the bugs in a blog post so that everybody (especially me) can find them.
On fluctuations in performance testing results · 2011-04-08 10:25 by Wladimir Palant
Yesterday I concluded that (with all bugs fixed) the results of Mozilla’s add-on performance measurements shouldn’t fluctuate by more than 2% of the Firefox startup time. Sorry, I was wrong. Later that day I noticed Read It Later, currently #43 on that list, supposedly causing 4% slower Firefox startup times. Yet this extension was definitely disabled during performance testing due to bug 648229. Does this now mean that each disabled add-on causes a 4% performance impact? Definitely not, disabled add-ons have no measurable effect on performance. So digging up the raw numbers for that add-on was definitely a good idea.
How reliable are Mozilla's performance measurements? · 2011-04-07 15:38 by Wladimir Palant
One of the replies to my previous blog post prompted me to take a closer look at the raw data from the add-on performance measurements. Can the numbers displayed on the blame list be trusted at all?
Some more details on Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-06 14:35 by Wladimir Palant
Mozilla Add-ons recently published an article on their effort to recognize slow add-ons. It comes complete with a list of worst offenders. Some media already picked up on that article and users are listening up. So everything is progressing nicely towards the goal — pressure on developers starts building up, I already had something like 10 people point out to me that Adblock Plus is number 12 on that list.
Taking a vacation from work with the community · 2011-04-06 00:24 by Wladimir Palant
Last week was very hard on me. I had to work under much pressure to fix several critical issues discovered immediately after Adblock Plus 1.3.5 release. At the same time the Adblock Plus community which used to be a great motivator seemed to go out of its way to demotivate me: