Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Extension update patterns · 2009-05-06 15:36 by Wladimir Palant

I recently released Adblock Plus 1.0.2 to fix a regression that would affect any user upgrading to Firefox 3.0.9. In the end, Adblock Plus upgrade was released only six days before Firefox 3.0.9 and the big question is of course — was that enough time? How many users ended up using the new Firefox release with an outdated Adblock Plus version?

Attention NoScript users · 2009-05-01 22:54 by Wladimir Palant

Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make its money from ads. And to make sure that somebody sees these ads it goes pretty far. For example, it opens the changelog webpage (full of ads of course) on every single update of the extension, even though the NoScript FAQ claim that it happens only on major updates (yes, if you dig into it you will find the preference to disable this behavior – but how many people do that?). And updates coming roughly each week ensure that this page is opened fairly often.

Element Hiding Helper: Always generate expressions with "raw CSS" · 2009-04-29 11:52 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Always using raw CSS for generated expressions (forum topic)
Prepared for Adblock Plus 1.1
Added horizontal scrolling to the DOM tree in composer

Adblock Plus Watcher 1.1.2 released · 2009-04-29 11:06 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Added “internal invocations” to the list – calls that do not come through content policy, especially element hiding hits
Prepared for Adblock Plus 1.1
Updated compatibility information

Some improvements to redirect tracking · 2009-04-28 16:06 by Wladimir Palant

Known issues

Blocked redirects cause a message in Error Console (“The async request failed because it was aborted by some user action”)
~~Redirects are not blocked for frames~~
~~Page doesn’t finish loading if redirects of scripts are blocked~~
~~Preferences: Disabled filters are sometimes marked as slow (forum topic)~~
~~Preferences: Hit column is too small by default, contents get cut off (forum topic)~~

Redirect tracking added · 2009-04-28 12:01 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Dropped compatibility with old browsers and cleaned up the code, now requiring at least: Firefox 3.0.9, SeaMonkey 2.0b1, Thunderbird 3.0b3, Songbird 1.1, Prism 1.0
Added handling of redirects, the redirect address now shows up in “Blockable items” as well and can be blocked
Started refactoring of browser integration code which runs in its own context now
Changed the way “add subscription” links work, these can now only be triggered by user clicking a link
Added diagnostic page displaying all errors related to Adblock Plus: chrome://adblockplus/content/errors.html
Preferences: “slow filter” warning is now a separate list column which can be used for sorting
Preferences: “close” button moved to the right side of the filter editor, made the button use Firefox 3 look
Preferences: improved position calculations for the filter editor, no longer makes the text position change
Preferences: using browser’s real find bar now instead of faking it
Fixed: opening Preferences in current Firefox nightlies selects wrong tree row (worked around bug 489881)
Fixed: detection of background images breaks the context menu in Firefox nightlies

Known issues

Current Element Hiding Helper version won’t work
Preferences: Disabled filters are sometimes marked as slow (forum topic)
Preferences: Hit column is too small by default, contents get cut off (forum topic)

Adblock Plus 1.0.2 released · 2009-04-15 19:07 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

New translation: Serbian
Element hiding works in Firefox 3.0.9 and higher again (forum topic, broken by fix for bug 416942)
Regular expressions with $domain options are recognized correctly
Blockable items: when copying addresses or filters to clipboard platform’s linebreaks are used as separator (previously: Unix linebreaks)
Preferences: using more compact date formatting for last hit column and last download of subscription

Known issues

Some translations contain untranslated English strings

Another release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.0.2 · 2009-04-12 14:50 by Wladimir Palant

This is a release candidate for Adblock Plus 1.0.2 that makes element hiding compatible with Firefox 3.0.9. A new branch ADBLOCK_PLUS_1_0_BRANCH has been created for this release, it doesn’t contain the refactoring work happening on the default branch.

Known issues

~~Element hiding broken in Firefox 3.0.8 and below~~

Adblock Plus Watcher 1.1.1 released · 2009-04-12 11:46 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Fixed content type display to work properly with Adblock Plus 1.0.1 and higher
Updated compatibility information

Release candidate with fixes for Firefox 3.0.9 · 2009-04-12 00:59 by Wladimir Palant

Note: Re-uploaded the development build to fix the compatibility range for Firefox.

Changes

Element hiding works in Firefox 3.0.9 and higher again (broken by fix for bug 416942)
Regular expressions with $domain options are recognized correctly
Blockable items: when copying addresses or filters to clipboard platform’s linebreaks are used as separator (previously: Unix linebreaks)
Preferences: using more compact date formatting for last hit column and last download of subscription