Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Status update: 2010-10-30 · 2010-10-31 10:04 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Major update to Element Hiding Helper code and architecture
- Added Shift+Mousewheel handling to Element Hiding Helper, also lock/unlock command
- Finalized Element Hiding Helper strings, translations started
- A little eye candy for Element Hiding Helper — better styling for hotkey labels
- Release candidates for Adblock Plus 1.3, Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Diagnostics 1.1.3 are done (the latter has no real changes, turned out none were necessary)
- Russian translation for Adblock Plus, Russian and German translations for Element Hiding Helper (with some help from forum.mozilla-russia.org users)
- Coordinated translations on Babelzilla, made sure the released locales are free of errors (way too many translations still unfinished however)
- Dropped Indonesian, Malay and Brasilian Portuguese locales from this Adblock Plus release, these weren’t even updated for Adblock Plus 1.2
Adblock Plus 1.3 release candidate is available · 2010-10-30 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3rc.20101030 is a release candidate, last chance to report bugs before Adblock Plus 1.3 is released (hopefully on Tuesday)!
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Dropped support for Firefox 3.0, Songbird versions before Songbird 1.9 and Midbrowser
- Got rid of “timed textboxes are deprecated” warning in console
- Simpler/faster preference management module
- About dialog: now shows localized homepage link
- Issue reporter: Fixed wrong character encoding in server response
Element Hiding Helper 1.1 release candidate available · 2010-10-30 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.1rc.20101030 is a release candidate, last chance to report bugs before Element Hiding Helper 1.1 is released (hopefully on Tuesday)!
Changes since previous announcement:
- Fixed: wrong window size calculation sometimes messed up displayed height of the elements
- Fixed: element marker position was updated every 20 milliseconds (endless loop)
- Better handling for the case that the marked element is not visible due to page scrolling
- About dialog: now shows localized homepage link
Element Hiding Helper 1.1 is feature complete · 2010-10-27 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
Element Hiding Helper 1.1b.20101027 development build contains all the features that will go into the final version, the outstanding changes should only be translations and bugfixes now. This build requires an Adblock Plus 1.3 development build. If things go well, both Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Adblock Plus 1.3 will be released on November 2nd.
Changes since the previous announcement:
- Dropped support for Firefox 3.0, Songbird versions before Songbird 1.9 and Midbrowser
- Compatible with Firefox 4 again (worked around bug 604736 among other things)
- Better code to mark selected elements, solves a number of issues
- Selection will no longer descend into data: frames (element hiding rules cannot be applied to elements in such frames)
- New “lock/unlock selection” command
- Alternative command hotkeys can be specified for languages where it isn’t clear which keyboard layout is being used (e.g. Russian)
- Element Hiding Helper has its own About dialog (reachable via Tools / Add-ons) and extension icon now
- Moved preferences to extensions.elemhidehelper.* branch (old preferences are imported automatically)
- Hotkey configuration will automatically ignore combinations that are already taken, specifying multiple options in extensions.elemhidehelper.selectelement_key preference is possible. The new default is Ctrl-Shift-K and Ctrl-Shift-S (the latter will be used on Firefox 4).
- Shift+Mousewheel can be used to triggger wider/narrower commands
- Composer: Better escaping of dangerous characters in CSS code (particularly for id and class attributes, forum topic)
- Composer: Warning when “My Element Hiding Rules” group is disabled
- Composer: Tag name isn’t checked by default if id or class attributes are present (forum topic)
- Composer: Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.composer_defaultDomain now controls which domain suggestion will be selected by default (forum topic)
- Preference extensions.elemhidehelper.acceptlocalfiles allows creating rules for local files (but won’t make these rules apply when used in Adblock Plus)
Dropping support for Firefox 3.0 · 2010-10-25 14:37 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3 will be using a simpler and faster module to manage preferences. This module isn’t in Adblock Plus development builds yet but it is already used in the latest Element Hiding Helper build. As it turned out, this module isn’t working properly in Firefox 3.0 due to some JavaScript engine bug. It’s not clear which bug it is and whether it has a simple work-around. Frankly, I am not very inclined to spend time researching historical bugs in Bugzilla. Instead, Adblock Plus 1.3 and Element Hiding Helper 1.1 will no longer support Firefox 3.0. Anybody still using Firefox 3.0 should be reminded that Mozilla ended support for Firefox 3.0 in March 2010, and by now it has a large number of known and unpatched security issues — using it to browse the web is not safe. I highly recommend updating to the latest Firefox release (currently Firefox 3.6).
Status update: 2010-10-22 · 2010-10-23 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Issue reporter client-side implementation
- Started beta phase for Adblock Plus
- Finalized Adblock Plus strings, translators started working
- Added third/first party indicator to document source column in blockable items
- Changed build system to centralize extension metadata in one file (particularly to allow generating homepage links for available languages automatically)
- Updated German translation (thanks to MonztA for proofreading)
- Rearchitectured Element Hiding Helper, made it more like Adblock Plus
- Changed configuration of Element Hiding Helper hotkeys to allow specifying multiple hotkeys (Ctrl-Shift-S is now used if Ctrl-Shift-K is taken)
- A few minor changes to Element Hiding Helper filter composer
First Adblock Plus 1.3 Beta · 2010-10-19 06:00 by Wladimir Palant
With Adblock Plus 1.3b.20101019 we are entering the beta phase for Adblock Plus 1.3. Most important thing to note is that the issue reporter is pretty much done, at least the part living in the extension. The server-side part of it will still need some work but reports submitted now should reach subscription maintainers eventually — so please enter “TEST” as comment when you are testing the feature so that these reports can be sorted out easily.
Other changes since the previous announcement:
- Blockable items tooltip will display information on disabled tooltips as well (forum topic)
- Triggering a subscription update always forces a re-download now
- ABP icon tooltip no longer counts disabled filters and subscriptions
- Improved filter matching performance by 20-35%
- Better filter composer suggestions (forum topic)
Status Update: 2010-10-15 · 2010-10-18 13:06 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- First draft of a privacy policy page is under discussion
- Some issue reporter polishing (particularly handling of transmission errors)
- Tons of Firefox 4 work after JavaScript compartments landing — filed bugs on three issues, fixed an issue in Adblock Plus, worked around another issue affecting Element Hiding Helper
- New icon to indicate slow filters (a developer doing graphical design — it’s an admirable attempt, you must give me that at least)
In progress
- Handling of special cases in issue reporter (e.g. users without filter subscriptions)
Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper issues in current Firefox nightlies · 2010-10-18 12:01 by Wladimir Palant
A few days ago an important and much anticipated change landed for the Firefox nightlies: JavaScript compartments. In theory, this should improve performance and security without having any side-effects whatsoever. This is a very radical change to the JavaScript engine architecture however and it caused a number of regressions of course. Some of them affect Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper extensions, I better list them before more bug reports are filed against Adblock Plus. Right now you can only hit these issues if you are using the latest Firefox nightly builds, not Firefox 4 Beta 6 however. I hope that the most critical issues will be resolved before Firefox 4 Beta 7.
New EasyList website live · 2010-10-11 09:11 by Wladimir Palant
Some might have noticed that the EasyList website hasn’t changed much in the past three years, it really needed to get a face lift. Michael has been working on a new website version for the past three months and now it is finally live. This should make finding EasyList-related information significantly easier. Also, the new website is available in two languages (English and German) with a third language (French) being planned.