Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Diagnostics 1.1.4 for Adblock Plus released · 2011-02-16 14:50 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with Diagnostics 1.1.4 this extension will no longer be available on the Mozilla Add-ons website. The main purpose of this release is to switch over update checks to adblockplus.org, this will allow automatic notifications about updates. It also fixes a minor issue: homepage link in the About Diagnostics dialog didn’t work.

Install Diagnostics 1.1.4 for Adblock Plus

Improving startup times · 2011-02-15 18:36 by Wladimir Palant

I implemented significant changes on the Adblock Plus core that allow the current development build (Adblock Plus 1.3.5a2.2826) to cache much of the data required at runtime on disk (cache.js file in the adblockplus directory). Instead of reading in patterns.ini file on startup Adblock Plus will now only read the cache file (requires in my tests approximately 35% of the old startup time). It will still load patterns.ini when its data is required, typically when the first page loads. For me this only requires 40% of the old startup time however because the data structures do not need to be rebuilt. So even if your browser doesn’t start with a blank page you should see around 25% speedup. And much of the delay will happen after the browser window opens. The new approach might have caused issues, please post a comment here or create a topic in the forum if you notice any.

Other changes since Adblock Plus 1.3.3 release:

Special icon state for “whitelisted” webpages has been removed, Adblock Plus shows up as disabled now (forum topic).
Corruption of patterns.ini file should be less likely now. If a corrupted patterns.ini is recognized a backup will be restored automatically.
Added support for Do-Not-Track header, will be activated automatically if a subscription like EasyPrivacy is added (forum topic).
Element hiding stylesheet is now written on disk as elemhide.css, this is both faster and more memory-effective.
Keyboard shortcut for Preferences is now Ctrl-Shift-F in Firefox 4 (Cmd-Shift-O on OS X) because Ctrl-Shift-E is already taken.
Fixed: Disabling filters from the list of blockable items won’t actually disable the filter in Firefox 3.6
Fixed: Selecting a filter (via blockable items’ “Edit filter in effect”) in an already open Preferences dialog doesn’t work

To the install page

Help needed to test YouTube ad blocking changes · 2011-02-09 11:27 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.0.26.613) changes the “Block ads inside YouTube videos” feature very significantly. We need your help to ensure that all ads are still being blocked. If you find a video that shows ads when viewed on youtube.com (not via a third-party website, see above), please report it as a comment here or in our forum.

No more status updates · 2011-02-04 20:53 by Wladimir Palant

I haven’t been publishing status updates for a while now. Reason is that the system doesn’t quite seem to work for me. Summarizing at the end of the week works well if I was focused on a few major tasks the whole week, on a chaotic week with lots of multitasking however I often simply don’t remember any more and wonder where the time has gone. Also, the next tasks that I list tend to get reprioritized, the list is often already outdated by the start of next week.

Updated roadmap (Adblock Plus 1.3.5) · 2011-02-04 17:07 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve just put Adblock Plus 1.3.5 on the roadmap. I mentioned this release a bunch of times but wasn’t sure whether we are actually going to release it or whether we will go to Adblock Plus 1.4 immediately. Now we have some nice improvements in the development builds (DNT header support, faster filter matching and startup, less memory used for element hiding) and releasing these improvements before Adblock Plus 1.4 definitely seems worth it. This is what Adblock Plus 1.3.5 will be about, a bunch of improvements under the hood that will hopefully make live better for some people. Adblock Plus 1.4 on the other hand is planned as a major user interface redesign.

Why you do not want to use the LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag · 2011-01-30 15:49 by Wladimir Palant

When you are creating a Firefox extension you don’t need to use browser’s default settings when downloading something, you can choose from a number of load flags defined on the nsIRequest interface instead. Some of them are really useful, e.g. the flags controlling caching. And then there is LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag that sounds like a good idea for downloads of public files — after all, why should you allow cookies and such? Making user tracking possible isn’t the point here.

K-Meleon builds mostly usable now · 2011-01-28 16:51 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus for K-Meleon 1.3.5a2.155) fixes some more issues:

List of blockable items works correctly now
Left and middle mouse button clicks on the icons work
Adding subscriptions from the web (via abp: protocol) is possible
Dialogs opened by Adblock Plus have more sane sizes, persisting size and position works again as well
Search in Preferences window working again (worked around K-Meleon bug 1237 but it would still be nice to see this bug fixed)
extensions.adblockplus.sendReport_key preference is considered properly if set

Remaining known issues:

K-Meleon crashes if the report link is clicked after submitting the report
ABP icon state and list of blockable items do not update correctly if a blank tab is open
“Tabs on Flash and Java” feature doesn’t work
Size of the “Add filter subscription” dialog is set incorrectly
Blockable items window cannot be closed with hotkeys (Esc or Ctrl+Shift+V)

List of Adblock Plus/Chrome issues · 2011-01-25 11:32 by Wladimir Palant

I just created a known issues page for Adblock Plus/Chrome. So far I can think of three main issues that are being raised regularly and that we cannot do much about right now. Does anybody have more?

adblockplus.org back after a lengthy downtime [updated] · 2011-01-23 05:30 by Wladimir Palant

I just brought adblockplus.org back from the longest downtime in four years (around 30 hours). What happened is that I broke the server when trying to update the Linux distribution used. Now updating the distribution on a live server is a risky affair but the hosting provider has several protection layers in place so that I didn’t expect more than one hour downtime if things go badly.

Some K-Meleon issues fixed · 2011-01-21 11:20 by Wladimir Palant

The current development build (Adblock Plus for K-Meleon 1.3.5a2.145) fixes some issues:

ABP icon state now works correctly with multiple windows
Issue reporter succeeds sending a report
About dialog is available now
Links will open correctly in a K-Meleon tab now

Remaining known issues:

List of blockable items doesn’t show anything
K-Meleon crashes if the report link is clicked after submitting the report
ABP icon state doesn’t update correctly when switching from/to a blank tab
Window sizes aren’t persisted properly
“Tabs on Flash and Java” feature doesn’t work
Left-click and middle-click on the icons won’t work
Search in Preferences window is only partially working (this is K-Meleon bug 1237)
Subscription links (abp: protocol) do not work