Adblock Plus and (a little) more

New info page for development builds · 2010-05-06 10:52 by Wladimir Palant

Most people using development builds no longer update them manually, reading development build announcements isn’t absolutely necessary either. It was time to update the website to consider these changed circumstances — requiring people looking for a download link to open a blog post doesn’t make sense any more. Instead I created an info page that people are send to when they click on “development builds” link. I tried to keep it short yet still give all the important information (and yes, I still consider some information more important than the installation link which is why I put it first). Subscribing to the announcements is merely a recommendation now.

Incompatible changes in current builds · 2010-05-02 11:38 by Wladimir Palant

As some already noticed, the current development builds (starting with 1.2.0+.2010050102) no longer work with extensions relying on Adblock Plus such as Element Hiding Helper or Filter Uploader. I should have announced this in advance, sorry about forgetting that. Right now is the rare occasion when Adblock Plus has to break compatibility with such extensions (last time was Adblock Plus 0.7.5.2).

Adblock Plus 1.2 released · 2010-04-30 15:42 by Wladimir Palant

Major changes

Completely reworked subscriptions user interface, better first-run experience
Many performance improvements, in particular improvements to startup time
Fixed most issues with the “Tabs on Flash and Java” feature
More information in the ABP icon tooltip
Better Fennec, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey support

New "Known issues" page · 2010-04-27 13:25 by Wladimir Palant

With the “known issues” section of release changelogs growing constantly lately I felt that moving it to a separate page would serve the cause better. This will allow us to link the the issue in question directly rather than saying “look at the end of the known issues section”, also the description can be more detailed without space restrictions. I put up a first version of this page, any comments? Can you think of other common issues that should be mentioned there?

Ah, that wonderful Flash installation experience... · 2010-04-22 10:57 by Wladimir Palant

Apparently, I am not the only one who noticed that the Flash installation experience has turned from bad to worse. Paul O’Shannessy uses pretty strong language to describe the procedure but I think it is justified. Until recently you could ignore all the bells and whistles and still download the executable which would then install Flash (and only Flash, regardless of the pre-checked crap that you might have forgotten to uncheck). Now you have to install the Adobe DLM extension (never mind that plug-in installation doesn’t usually require a browser restart) and there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid it. Still wonder why so many people want to see Flash obsoleted by HTML5?

Second Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-22 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010042202) is the second release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. The scheduled release date is April 30th.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Updated translations: 27 locales are done, two more are complete but being tested
Opening a new tab from the list of blockable items respects browser preferences, esp. with regards to opening in background (bug 22722)
Fixed some cases where opening tabs from Adblock Plus in Thunderbird/SeaMonkey would trigger the default browser unnecessarily
Improved Fennec (Firefox Mobile) integration, using the site menu in Fennec 1.1 to display Adblock Plus status
Thunderbird: moved Adblock Plus toolbar icon to the message header which is a better place for it
A bunch of minor tweaks around toolbar icon in Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
Added $elemhide option for exception rules to disable element hiding on a page, unlike $document this option doesn’t affect frames embedded in a page or items matching blocking rules (forum topic)

First Adblock Plus 1.2 release candidate available · 2010-04-14 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010041402) is the first release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.2. All features on the roadmap have been implemented and I am starting the final translation stage.

Changes since the previous announcement:

Added Fanboy’s List as recommended filter subscription
Subscription selection dialog: if multiple options are available for user’s locale one is selected randomly
Filter composer: Added “block entire domain” as suggestion (forum topic)
Firefox Mobile/Fennec: Added Adblock Plus status to site identity panel, clicking will disable/enable Adblock Plus on site
Fixed: Subscription selection not always showing up on first start if previous browser session is restored
Fixed: Toolbar icon not showing correctly with Songbird’s new default theme

Changes to the "Show tabs on Flash and Java" feature, second round · 2010-03-30 07:00 by Wladimir Palant

The current Adblock Plus development build (1.1.3+.2010033002) once again reworks “Show tabs on Flash and Java” feature. This should keep all of the advantages of the previous approach but make the issues (unreliable and ugly display on Linux, focus stealing, bad positioning) go away.

NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED status in nsIHttpChannel · 2010-03-19 09:17 by Wladimir Palant

Dear Lazyweb! Do you have any idea why XMLHttpRequest might fail with channel.status being NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED? This seems to be happening consistently for some Adblock Plus users when downloading https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. This issue is happening on all platforms and across all supported Firefox versions (I see 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 in the logs).

The unnecesary Ars Technica rant · 2010-03-16 16:25 by Wladimir Palant

Please forgive me this (hopefully unusual) rant. It is simply that I am so disappointed. Over the years I learned that quality journalism is extremely rare. I also came to expect very little from the media (both online and offline) — most often, journalists fail at what I consider the very basics of their job, namely understanding what they are writing about and verifying the information (I very much appreciate the exceptions to that rule but they are just that — exceptions). No problem, if it is important I can usually find the original source and get myself an overview. As it is, getting me disappointed is hard. But apparently not impossible.