Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 1.3.5 release candidate available · 2011-03-19 14:59 by Wladimir Palant
The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.5rc.2902) is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.3.5. We are already in string freeze, the translators are in the process of updating the translations. There is a slight chance that Firefox Sync support will still be added, other than that the remaining changes should be minor (maybe a few changes to the K-Meleon support so that we can release this version for K-Meleon as well).
The area that needs most testing is still Firefox Mobile 4.0 support, please give it a try. Changes since the previous announcement:
- Added a “Recommend us on Facebook” button as an experiment
- Disallowed issue reports with more than 5 filter subscriptions
The plan for Adblock Plus 1.3.5 · 2011-03-19 14:53 by Wladimir Palant
The development build users noticed already — Adblock Plus 1.3.5 release is coming close, the current development build is already designated as a “release candidate”. With the release of Firefox 4 (both desktop and mobile) I thought that we need to release soon as well. One issue that people are complaining is the shortcut key for Adblock Plus preferences — in Firefox 4 it conflicts with the Panorama shortcut key. More important however is the support for Firefox Mobile 4.0 (Fennec). Thanks to some great help from Fabrice Desré I was able to add support in a very short time and we need to release it now. So yesterday I started string freeze for Adblock Plus 1.3.5, the plan is to release on March 25th.
Update (2011-03-22): I am getting close to a working Firefox Sync support. However, I am now certain that landing it for Adblock Plus 1.3.5 will be too risky. Instead these changes should land shortly after Adblock Plus 1.3.5 and will be available in the development builds. We can do one more release once things look stable.
Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™ (Beta) 1.1.2 released · 2011-03-17 17:00 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™
Changes
- Fixed: Element hiding rules inside a frame check the wrong domain name (forum topic)
- Fixed: Adblock Plus still triggers WebKit bug 45586 even when disabled (bug 23774)
Added support for Firefox Mobile 4.0 · 2011-03-17 14:57 by Wladimir Palant
The current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.5b.2866) added support for Firefox Mobile 4.0 (many thanks to Fabrice Desré who did much of the work). Despite the significant architectural changes everything seems to work smoothly. As far as I know, there are only two issues:
- Do-not-track support isn’t working. This isn’t going to change, with the current approach this feature would double the number of synchronous requests between content and chrome processes — not worth it.
- We might be able to reduce the number of synchronous requests by using a cache, this should make things faster. To be done soon.
Other than that, the usual limitations apply — our user interface in Firefox Mobile is very limited, do not expect the same functionality as on the desktop. In particular, only one filter subscription at a time is supported.
Update: It only took five minutes after publishing this and I found one more issue: subscription selection page doesn’t come up on first install, you have to select a subscription in extension options manually. Update2: This will be fixed in the next development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.5b.2871).
Update3 (2011-03-18): Starting with Adblock Plus 1.3.5b.2886 all the issues on the first-run page should be fixed. The page layout is more what is expected for Firefox Mobile, the selection list can actually be used and confirming selection will only close the tab and not the entire browser.
All other changes since the previous announcement are minor.
Adblock Plus for Chrome development builds will not update automatically, manual action required · 2011-03-14 10:15 by Wladimir Palant
I made a mistake when choosing the versioning scheme of Adblock Plus/Chrome development builds, as a result Adblock Plus 1.1 development builds are considered newer than Adblock Plus 1.1.1 builds and Chrome will not update the extension automatically. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there is any solution on my side other than releasing Adblock Plus 1.2 — and we are not there yet. So if you have Adblock Plus 1.1.6xx installed please save your settings, uninstall the development build, then install the current version and restore the settings. I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
Element Hiding Helper 1.1.1 released · 2011-03-11 17:50 by Wladimir Palant
Install Element Hiding Helper 1.1.1
Changes
- Improved escaping of attribute values
- Fixed: Hotkeys in the help tooltip are invisible with some browser themes
- Fixed: Clicking homepage link in About dialog doesn’t do anything
- Fixed: Preview doesn’t work correctly if the rule contains international characters
- Fixed: Broken composer dialog with
composer_defaultDomainpreference set to 1 or 2 if host name is an IP address
Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™ (Beta) 1.1.1 released · 2011-03-11 16:11 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™
Changes
- Fixed: When something is blocked it won’t disappear until a refresh (regression in Adblock Plus 1.1)
- Options: allowed multiple selection in “Own filters” tab
- Added Chrome issue 68705 work-around for Yahoo Mail as well, typing into To field isn’t possible otherwise.
Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™ (Beta) 1.1 released · 2011-02-28 16:58 by Wladimir Palant
Install Adblock Plus for Google Chrome™
Changes
- All filters are used for blocking content now, not only filters like “||example.com$third-party”
- Grey icon is now being used for websites where Adblock Plus is disabled (forum topic)
- Rewritten blocking of video ads on youtube.com to make it more reliable and free of side-effects
- Added more websites to the list of WebKit bug 45586 work-arounds
- Better filter matching performance
- Removed initial hiding of Flash which is no longer necessary
- Fixed: Options panel width is sometimes too small, should use the entire window (forum topic)
Einbürgerung in den deutschen Staatsverband - im Detail · 2011-02-28 00:06 by Wladimir Palant
This lengthy German-language blog post deals with the issues of the German naturalization process and should be irrelevant to most people not living in Germany.
Diese Woche gab es hier ein wichtiges Ereignis: meine Frau hat endlich die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft bekommen. Ich konnte den Prozess von Anfang an miterleben und sehen, wie das heutzutage abläuft. Da es aber kaum deutschsprachige Beschreibungen dazu gibt, denke ich nicht, dass sich allzu viele meiner deutschen Mitbürger damit auskennen. Ich schreibe es einfach hier auf, vielleicht gibt es dann bei der nächsten Debatte um die Einbürgerung weniger schlecht informierte Meinungen.
Adblock Plus 1.1 for Chrome release candidate available · 2011-02-25 15:58 by Wladimir Palant
The current development build (Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.0.26.633) is a release candidate, I hope to release Adblock Plus 1.1 early next week. Changes since the previous announcement:
- Removed “initial hiding” feature that should be unnecessary now
- Improved YouTube video ad blocking which occasionally failed because of timing issues
- Fixed hiding of document body backgrounds (regression from “proper blocking” changes, forum topic)
- Made options panel wider (forum topic)
- Fanboy’s List is now available as a choice in the Options panel