Adblock Plus and (a little) more
What is going on with EasyList · 2009-04-07 13:06 by Wladimir Palant
EasyList development has to continue, despite the sad events. Many of you already know Ares2, he is a very active (and helpful) member of both EasyList and Adblock Plus forums. He has been maintaining a German complementary subscription for EasyList and Rick was speaking highly of his work. I asked Ares2 to take over EasyList maintenance and I am glad to announce that he accepted.
Sad news · 2009-04-06 14:06 by Wladimir Palant
I got very sad news on Saturday. My friend and long-time Adblock Plus contributor Rick Petnel passed away Friday night. I was informed about his illness two weeks ago but simply refused to believe that it might end like that. Sadly, there is no way of denying it any more.
The monetization dilemma · 2009-03-25 13:02 by Wladimir Palant
There has been a fair amount of discussion lately on the topic of earning money with extensions. Yesterday I read Kent James’ blog post – and only a few minutes later I noticed yet another mail titled “Commercial offer” in my inbox. Now these are typically about some crazy business model they need my help with, usually something along the lines of replacing ads with other ads and redirecting website’s income into your own pocket by doing that. Not this time. An employee of a search engine company suggested I add a checkbox to the post-install Adblock Plus page which will add their search engine to Firefox and change user’s homepage to their entry page (all that restricted to the country where they operate). And they would pay me for each change performed of course.
Adblock Plus screencast online · 2009-03-13 16:02 by Wladimir Palant
Ian Ozsvald and Richard Mitchelson from ProCasts offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable:
Hidden cost of (not) using Venkman · 2009-03-12 19:12 by Wladimir Palant
I came across a Venkman “feature” that was so unexpected that I even filed a JavaScript engine bug on it. Only after Gijs Kruitbosch asked me to test with a clean profile I realized that the JavaScript performance issue I was seeing wasn’t inherent to Firefox but rather something the Venkman extension was responsible for. That’s right, Venkman is degrading JavaScript performance just by being installed, even if you don’t use it. I had Venkman installed “just in case” and this was a big surprise to me.
Mixing absolute and relative lengths in SVG clip paths · 2009-03-12 12:14 by Wladimir Palant
A supposedly simple task turned out to be pretty hard and now I am left guessing whether I am dealing with an SVG spec issue or with a Gecko bug. I need to make corners of a XUL element transparent, something that should be easy if you apply SVG effects to it.
Getting rid of Flash cookies · 2009-03-02 12:57 by Wladimir Palant
Pretty much every Flash movie on the web today uses Flash Player’s global storage feature to store data on your disk, similar to regular browser cookies. What makes this feature so problematic is the lack of proper control mechanisms. For example, for browser cookies I selected “Keep until I close Firefox” which makes sure that cookies can be set (no site functionality is broken) but won’t survive too long. But this setting won’t apply to Flash data. Same goes for the Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.1, it has absolutely no effect on Flash. Note also that Flash data is the same for all browsers and all profiles.
EasyList downloads back on easylist.adblockplus.org - most of the time · 2009-02-27 02:21 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I decided to move EasyList downloads to MozDev. However, my bandwidth limit increased greatly since then and I can handle the traffic myself now. So taking the load away from MozDev’s server that surely has better things to do seems to be a good idea. Also, downloads get more reliable again because they don’t depend on two servers. For now I let easylist.adblockplus.org serve 80% of the requests while remaining 20% are still being redirected to MozDev. I want to see how that goes, might change the proportions again later.
Avoiding naming conflicts in overlays · 2009-02-16 23:12 by Wladimir Palant
XUL overlays are a great mechanism for extending existing functionality. However, there is a catch — any scripts loaded by an overlay are sharing the namespace with the scripts loaded by the original page and the scripts loaded by other overlays (typically from other extensions). So if extension Foo defines a global variable myGreatVar and extension Bar chooses to define a global variable myGreatVar as well, bad things will happen — both extensions will end up accessing the same variable and usually both extensions will behave erratically because of that. Same happens with functions, if two scripts define the same global functions the second function definition will override the first. The situation is worst for constants — a constant cannot be redeclared meaning that one of the extensions will cause an error message.
More extension puzzles · 2009-02-11 17:42 by Wladimir Palant
Since Haploid solved my previous puzzle way too fast, here is another one: what is that page really trying to load? And why is it that NoScript and Adblock Plus disagree so much on that — none of the dozen domains NoScript is showing show up in Adblock Plus and the one request showing up in Adblock Plus doesn’t show in NoScript.