Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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
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.
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
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.