Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Extension conflicts, 2009 edition · 2009-11-24 11:01 by Wladimir Palant
I realized something yesterday. I thought about the add-ons that caused me trouble lately by breaking Adblock Plus (and often the browser as well) — .NET Framework Assistant, Skype Extension, Ask Toolbar (a.k.a. Zone Alarm Toolbar a.k.a. Foxit Toolbar). I noticed that they all have something in common: none of these extensions is being hosted on AMO, consequently none of them had to pass AMO’s review process. So while AMO’s review process still receives its fair amount of criticism and the AMO team continues to improve — apparently, it managed to achieve an important goal. The AMO editor team enforced good coding practices successfully enough to make conflicts between extensions hosted on AMO rare, it is mostly external extensions causing the trouble now. My congratulations to the editors and to the entire AMO team!
Adblock Plus source code documentation · 2009-11-20 09:29 by Wladimir Palant
Sometime before the release of Adblock Plus 1.0 I started adding JSDoc comments throughout Adblock Plus source code. The idea was that source code documentation will be generated from it automatically in future. This took a while but now it is finally there. This documentation is updated whenever new development builds are created. There are still issues of course, some parts that aren’t properly documented and others where the documentation could be improved. Also, for now the documentation only covers the code that runs in the namespace of the XPCOM module (AdblockPlus.js), the UI code isn’t present. This should change in future.
Mercurial over HTTPS - ouch, SSL isn't always secure · 2009-11-18 08:43 by Wladimir Palant
I set up my Mercurial server as HTTPS only. The idea behind it was that establishing a secure communication channel outweighs the disadvantages (server load, more traffic and somewhat slower pull operations) for a small server like that. But then I had second thoughts — I am using a StartCom certificate that isn’t yet accepted everywhere, what if somebody cannot pull the repository because of that?
Moving Adblock Plus source code · 2009-11-16 17:49 by Wladimir Palant
Almost four years ago, Adblock Plus started out as a project hosted on MozDev.org. It quickly outgrew this hosting and moved to its own domain, yet some parts of it remained on MozDev — including source code. That’s until now. I finally made the decision to host my source code myself, having five extensions, downloads and web content in a single repository was simply too much of a mess. After some waving with hg convert and a little manual help I am proudly presenting you hg.adblockplus.org.
AMO getting serious about add-on security · 2009-11-14 15:36 by Wladimir Palant
Good news: AMO is finally getting serious about improving security of add-ons. Several bugs that I filed almost a year ago and didn’t have time to follow up on have suddenly seen some movement, even to the point of setting a two weeks deadline to resolve the security issues (thanks, Jorge). Sure, this approach won’t make you new friends and one add-on author preferred to remove his add-ons rather than fix them. But it is really overdue to start enforcing policies.
SeaMonkey 2.0 is finally out! · 2009-10-27 15:07 by Wladimir Palant
Anybody complaining about “Install script not found” error when installing Adblock Plus — there is finally a stable SeaMonkey version where you can install Adblock Plus. SeaMonkey 2.0 is out, go get it!
Atomic orbital viewer with WebGL · 2009-10-04 17:19 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I found an application that I wrote more than 10 years ago — atomic orbital viewer. Back then I got interested in the pictures of atomic orbitals you get presented in chemistry class, found the special-case formulas for electron distribution and generalized them. And then I wrote an application to visualize these orbitals. Since I didn’t have access to 3D hardware or even literature on 3D graphics I ended up reinventing everything — yes, I used to have that kind of time back then. What came out was a Turbo Pascal (DOS) application where I’ve written almost everything myself, including low-level mouse handling and GUI library.
New job again · 2009-09-02 20:46 by Wladimir Palant
In case somebody noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet recently — many things happened which kept me occupied. In particular, I started a new job yesterday and will now be developing Songbird. I have been following Songbird’s development since the very beginning and even managed to develop one of the first third-party add-ons for it. It is a very interesting project and a great development team so I am really excited about this.
Downloading Xenocode's "sandboxed" applications · 2009-08-28 18:29 by Wladimir Palant
A while ago there was an announcement that the company Xenocode was providing virtualized versions of applications, particularly browsers. While what they provide isn’t real sandboxes (the applications that you run there can still write files to the disk, e.g. if you download something from the web) it is still an easy way of running browsers without having to install them — Xenocode makes sure that from application’s point of view everything that should be there after installation is there. In particular, you can run Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 on the same machine at the same time — no need for complicated registry hacks. Of course, this should only be used for testing websites that are safe, you won’t get security updates for these Internet Explorer instances.
To anybody using Firefox 2.0 or Adblock Plus 1.0.2 - it is time to upgrade · 2009-08-27 22:05 by Wladimir Palant
According to AMO statistics, there is still a considerable number of people using Adblock Plus 1.0.2 or older (around 20% of the entire user base). While there might be different reasons for that (most important one probably being the fact that current Adblock Plus versions don’t support Firefox 2), if you are one of them then I have news for you: it is time to upgrade. Seriously. Go get Adblock Plus 1.1.1 now. If you are still using Firefox 2 — go get Firefox 3.5.