Adblock Plus and (a little) more

New website version ready for testing · 2010-09-04 02:34 by Wladimir Palant

As many people probably noticed, the Adblock Plus website is urgently in need of some updates and rewriting. Unfortunately, making changes is too hard because the three language versions of the website need to be kept in sync. Some time ago we found Anwiki which (unlike Textpattern that is currently used) is specifically designed to handle content in multiple languages. You make the changes in one language and they automatically pop up in the other languages, marked as untranslated. And creating new translations of existing pages is trivial. And links to untranslated pages will be automatically redirected to English. Just perfect.

Status Update: 2010-08-27 · 2010-08-30 10:06 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Finished redesigning the way Adblock Plus stores its data, now following the minimalistic approach to get the best performance and minimal memory use. The usability of blockable items list suffered somewhat but seems to be acceptable so far.
Improved subscription downloads, especially to ensure better distribution over the week. Also some detail improvements and better/more unit tests.
One more trivial Firefox 4 fix due to changes in bug 383930. The issue is a minor annoyance when dealing with submenus of the context menu.
Set up a blog for EasyList, Zine turned out to be the best option after all, despite its development being seemingly stale. This blog will eventually be migrated to Zine as well, shouldn’t be too complicated.

New way to store data · 2010-08-27 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The new development build (1.3a.20100826) has gone through some major rearchitecturing, the way it stores data changed radically. The purpose of this change is to improve performance and memory use: Adblock Plus no longer stores more data than necessary and will do only as little bookkeeping as absolutely necessary. The areas affected by this change are:

List of blockable items (will no longer show all data immediately when opened, instead it will take a few seconds to fetch the data)
Toolbar icon tooltip (now counts the actual hits so that the number might be higher than what you see in the list of blockable items)
Filter composer dialog (adding a filter will no longer re-apply filters to all of the current window, only to the element you opened the composer for)
Context menu (behavior should be unchanged except for a recent regression fixed – handling of background images should be correct again)
Tabs on Flash and Java (behavior should be unchanged)
Blocking of redirects (I hope that the behavior is unchanged here)

I already noticed a side-effect: in Firefox 3.0/3.5 touching a node that is hidden causes element hiding rules to be reapplied. Since opening the list of blockable items touches nodes you might see hit count for element hiding rules go up when you do it. This issue is no longer present in Firefox 3.6.

Important changes coming to the Adblock Plus project · 2010-08-22 18:42 by Wladimir Palant

As I indicated before, there is much work to be done in the Adblock Plus project to keep it relevant. How are we coming along? Well, very slowly. The main problem remains my availability, too many of the tasks still hang on me. I tried delegating work, quite successfully in some areas, but that’s not enough — and moving some other areas out of my hands (like website localization or bug reports handling) requires some work on my part first. We are currently getting into the “interesting” phase with the Adblock Plus project where we actually get a chance to influence something and I think that moving faster is essential now.

Status Update: 2010-08-20 · 2010-08-20 18:56 by Wladimir Palant

I’ll try to publish these status updates at the end of each week — this is mainly a way for me to organize my work but it might also prove useful to somebody who wants to track Adblock Plus work. If you are annoyed by them — these will always appear in the “progress” category, many RSS feed readers allow filtering by post category. I’ll also explicitly not post these in the “adblock plus” category.

Done

Fixed regressions introduced by Firefox 4 development
Released Adblock Plus 1.2.2 from 1.2.x branch to allow using stable release with Firefox 4 betas/nightlies
Mediated morphing of RuAdList into an EasyList supplement

Why app-global extensions are essentially broken · 2010-08-18 12:44 by Wladimir Palant

Should I rather title this blog post “App-global extensions considered harmful”? I hope not because I see some valid use cases for installing an extension in a central location where it will be taken over regardless of the profile used. However, the current implementation in XULRunner/Firefox has some very nasty side-effects which make using this mechanism a bad choice. And there are apparently many people making the same experience.

Adblock Plus 1.2.2 released · 2010-08-18 10:15 by Wladimir Palant

Note: The issue with transparent context menus in Firefox 4 Beta 3 hasn’t been entirely resolved, it still affects the context menu of the toolbar icon. If another 1.2.x release becomes necessary this issue will be addressed there, otherwise in Adblock Plus 1.3.

Changes

Updates to support Firefox 4 nightly builds and Firefox 4 Beta 3
Subscription dialog: Made “Add a different subscription” button less prominent
Subscription dialog: Fixed bad Chinese translation for the “Add a different subscription” button

How about making extension compatibility updates less annoying? · 2010-08-15 20:06 by Wladimir Palant

I came back from a vacation today and found around 20 mails in my inbox along the lines of “When will Adblock Plus be compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3?” There are probably a dozen more questions in the forum which I didn’t check yet. Now I know of course that Adblock Plus is compatible with Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 because lots of people (yours truly included) regularly use Adblock Plus in nightly builds. So all I had to do was to log into AMO and change the compatibility info for Adblock Plus.

How do users end up with a misconfigured certificate store? · 2010-07-27 17:18 by Wladimir Palant

I am out of ideas so maybe somebody knows more than me here. I noticed that some Adblock Plus users cannot download https://easylist.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. Data from a different filter list which switched to HTTPS recently indicates that most of these clients cannot establish an HTTPS connection — most likely the certificate is rejected. I did a very rough estimate, we are talking about something like 0.3% of all Adblock Plus users. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but turns into tens of thousands users in absolute numbers.

Why I had to ban China - fighting spam · 2010-07-26 15:54 by Wladimir Palant

I want to start with an apology to the few Chinese who are using this website for legitimate purposes — next time they try to post on the forum or comment on my blog they will most likely see an error page. Which is really a pity and I feel bad about that. But I cannot really see another way.