Adblock Plus and (a little) more
MAOW presentation slides · 2008-09-22 10:47 by Wladimir Palant
I was invited to give a talk at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris this weekend so I tried to give people an idea what it takes to maintain an extension project that already got rolling. The presentation went fairly well even though I could have told much more and I had to scrap the slide on security because the time has simply run out. My slides can be viewed here (note that FullerScreen extension messes the slides up badly, as we discovered just before the presentation).
Making modal dialogs work on Mac OS X · 2008-09-15 22:49 by Wladimir Palant
If you ever tried TomTom HOME, you probably noticed that its user interface is “unusual”. It tries to mimic the user interface of a navigation device meaning among others that all messages (“dialogs”) replace the entire window content and require you to dismiss them before you can continue doing whatever you have been doing. There are some advantages to that kind of user interface but it was also a constant source of irritation among our testers (and, no doubt, users). In particular, you could still use the menu despite the dialog, with strange results.
Creating quality software · 2008-09-13 15:56 by Wladimir Palant
It got quiet around Adblock Plus again after some great strides towards Adblock Plus 0.8. That doesn’t mean however that nothing is happening, on the contrary. However, when I was about to add another small user interface change (one of the few that are still due for 0.8 release), I noticed that this is way more complicated than it should be. Why?
Filtering HTML code in Adblock Plus · 2008-09-11 18:54 by Wladimir Palant
Henrik Gemal blogged about a new feature in Firefox, extensions can now inspect and modify the response of HTTP requests before it gets to the sender. And the best news is, it is coming to Firefox 3.0.3 as well, so extension developers don’t need to wait a year before this feature can be used. Obviously, Firebug and Firekeeper developers want this — the former to display the response, the latter to prevent a malicious response from ever reaching the sender. However, it could be useful for Adblock Plus as well.
Don't bother reporting your plugin issues to me · 2008-08-27 12:18 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus is based on content policies, and content policies don’t get along with plugins too well — so I am used to dealing with plugin issues that are regularly reported as bugs in Adblock Plus. Typically, in those cases I try to reproduce the issue, create minimized testcases and report the problem at bugzilla.mozilla.org (if there is no such report already of course). Finding the actual source of the problem and fixing it would require more time than I can spend but thanks to Boris Zbarsky and Johnny Stenback this still didn’t work out too bad, all the issues I am aware of have been fixed in Firefox 3.
And who comes to visit your web site? · 2008-08-07 01:49 by Wladimir Palant
I often see people complaining that the page impressions on their site don’t match their ad impressions. Apparently, a large percentage of their visitors (you see numbers like 50% mentioned) don’t see their ads. And it is easy enough to find the guilty party — ad blocking software. The enemy is found, the world makes sense again, and the energy can be spent on solving the “issue”.
Only that something doesn’t make sense: judging by numbers of active daily users, no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed. And I doubt that other ad blockers have a significantly larger user base.
Improved startup and shutdown performance · 2008-07-30 01:30 by Wladimir Palant
Changes
- Fixed: Blockable items list header is hidden in fullscreen mode
- Significantly reduced the time for reading patterns list from disk as well as for writing it back
- Reduced the amount of memory used for long filter lists
- Made sure patterns file isn’t overwritten unless write was successful (bug 16488)
Known issues
Object tabs open preferences rather than the filter composerIP addresses are always considered first partyWhen subscriptions are added the updates aren’t enabled by defaultPreferences: “Regexp tooltip” is shown for enabled column
Using XULRunner platform · 2008-07-15 11:24 by Wladimir Palant
It is now more than a year that I started working on TomTom HOME, an application to manage personal navigation devices. The original version of this application (TomTom HOME 1.x) was written entirely in C++ and used wxWidgets library. After some time it became an unmaintainable mess, and a decision was made that a better platform for user interface development is necessary. I wasn’t around when XULRunner was chosen as this platform but I am happy that it was — that’s how I came aboard, two months before the first release of TomTom HOME 2. Now we are closing in on a fifth major release, and it is time to summarize how XULRunner did as a platform.
Reconfiguring CheckPoint VPN-1 to allow FTPS connections · 2008-07-13 17:05 by Wladimir Palant
I recently tried using FTPS (SSL-encrypted FTP) and noticed that it didn’t work, immediately after “AUTH TLS” command the connection was disconnected. That happened independently of the server I tried to connect to and the server wasn’t aware of any disconnect. I am posting the solution here since more people might be affected by this.
Blocking malicious sites with Adblock Plus · 2008-07-03 11:48 by Wladimir Palant
I was reading about yet another wave of attacks exploiting a Flash vulnerability. It turned out that the Flash vulnerability used was already fixed but that doesn’t really matter — Adobe seems incapable of updating users to a secure Flash version in a timely fashion. So Firefox users were at risk here as well, and the continuing waves of SQL Injection attacks inserting malicious iframes into trusted websites didn’t exactly make the situation better.