Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Element Hiding Helper 1.1 released · 2010-11-03 13:28 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Compatible with Adblock Plus 1.3, older Adblock Plus versions are no longer supported
Compatible with Firefox 4, dropped support for Firefox 3.0
Generating more efficient filters by default
Better handling of elements with multiple classes
More reliable approach to determine and mark element position
Selecting parent node and moving to a different child no longer resets selection
New “lock/unlock selection” command
Ctrl+Mousewheel can be used to trigger wider/narrower commands
Alternative set of hotkeys in some languages where two keyboard layouts are possible (e.g. Russian)
Better styling of hotkeys in tooltips
All preferences are now stored under extensions.elemhidehelper.*
Hotkey Ctrl-Shift-S will be used if Ctrl-Shift-K is taken (e.g. in Firefox 4), can be changed in extensions.elemhidehelper.selectelement_key preference
Own icon and About dialog, better mechanism to manage the dependency on Adblock Plus
Composer warns now if the filter is being added to a disabled group
extensions.elemhidehelper.composer_defaultDomain preference determines which domain suggestion is selected by default
Added hidden preference to allow selecting in local files (rules created this way will have no effect)

Adblock Plus 1.3.1 released · 2010-11-03 13:22 by Wladimir Palant

Note: Adblock Plus 1.3 release was pulled due to an issue with the builds.

Major changes

New issue reporter allows notifying subscription authors about issues easily
Better Firefox 4 support, dropped support for Firefox 3.0
Significantly improved performance and memory use

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)