Adblock Plus and (a little) more

JavaScript modules in a JAR file - finally! · 2010-06-18 10:45 by Wladimir Palant

I don’t know why nobody announced this yet, a very important change landed on mozilla-central a few days ago. JavaScript modules can now be located in JAR files and loaded directly via chrome:// URLs. So an extension can now keep its modules in the JAR file along with all the other code.

Redundant filter finder updated · 2010-06-12 02:56 by Wladimir Palant

I updated the tool to find useless filters, the new version uses new code from Adblock Plus and better considers filter options. Element hiding rules are left unchanged as before — I am not aware of any way to detect redundancies there. Please report any abnormalities you notice in the new version, there might still be bugs.

Impact of Adblock Plus on startup time - revisited · 2010-06-10 02:31 by Wladimir Palant

A few months ago Taras Glek blogged about extensions having a significant impact on browser’s startup time. One of the extensions he measured was Adblock Plus 1.1.3 and it didn’t make a good figure. Originally I thought that significantly optimizing Adblock Plus initialization wasn’t possible but I then found that using lazy evaluation for some values improved the performance of Adblock Plus 1.2 quite significantly. So I decided to check what things look like now.

The wrong way to deal with privacy concerns · 2010-05-26 14:30 by Wladimir Palant

Generally, I am not the guy to pick on Google. I think that they usually bring out very solid (often brilliant) solutions and do a good job on the privacy front (meaning: far from perfect but significantly better than the competition). All the more surprising was their release of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which doesn’t quite live up to the expected quality.

Renaming extensions · 2010-05-21 11:24 by Wladimir Palant

Some people using development builds probably noticed already: the full name of Element Hiding Helper is no longer “Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper” but rather “Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus”. Given that some people are still confusing Element Hiding Helper with Adblock Plus this change is long overdue. The only reason it hasn’t been implemented earlier is that the new name is no longer language-neutral, it needs to be translated into various languages. But that’s something that can be done now. Element Hiding Helper also got its own icon which is slightly different from the Adblock Plus icon.

Compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a restored · 2010-05-20 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Element Hiding Helper 1.1a.20100520 restores compatibility with Adblock Plus 1.3a, it isn’t compatible with Adblock Plus 1.2 and below however. Other changes:

Dependency on Adblock Plus is managed “manually” now. This means that rather than becoming disabled in Add-on Manager without obvious reason Element Hiding Helper will now show a message suggesting to install/update/enable Adblock Plus and allowing to accomplish that with one click. Note: a message that a restart is necessary isn’t being displayed yet.
Marked as compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2.

Changes to Adblock Plus extensibility mostly done · 2010-05-20 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

Starting with todays development build (1.3a.20100520) other extensions can extend Adblock Plus again. While details of the Adblock Plus API might change, the latest Element Hiding Helper development build (1.1a.20100520) should work well. Adblock Plus Watcher will be updated as well soon.

Other changes since Adblock Plus 1.2:

Major architectural changes to allow Adblock Plus to install without restart in Firefox 4 — this work is mostly done but currently blocked on Firefox issues (especially bug 564667).
Marked compatible with SeaMonkey 2.1a2
Made sure image maps can be blocked via context menu (bug 16605).
Fixed a long-standing bug: comments could be interpreted as element hiding rules (topic 5484).
Removed code checking for Adblock and Filterset.G installations, both are pretty rare by now.
Removed background images as a separate type, these are now reported with type “image” as well ($background option is equivalent to $image for reasons of backwards compatibility). Distinguishing background images and “regular” images was broken at least since Firefox 3.6.

More roadmaps · 2010-05-19 22:17 by Wladimir Palant

The roadmap page now lists the roadmap for Element Hiding Helper and Adblock Plus Watcher extensions. There is usually little planning for these extensions but since there is some now I decided to add it to the roadmap and see how it works out.

Downloading a file regularly - how hard can it be? · 2010-05-11 11:06 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve been playing a little with numbers to find a way to get filter subscription downloads distributed equally throughout the week. You probably guessed it from the title of this post, getting the desired behavior isn’t quite easy.

Status of the Adblock Plus project, spring 2010 · 2010-05-06 22:11 by Wladimir Palant

With Adblock Plus 1.2 being released and many other things going on I felt that it would be useful to give a summary of where we are now and what are the areas that we need to focus on next. I am not sure whether it is something I would publish regularly, maybe.