Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Preparing to release Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4 · 2008-04-04 23:31 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Default keyboard shortcuts have been changed to avoid conflicts in Firefox 3 and Thunderbird
Remove “Check banner links” option (forum thread)
Content policy now returns “blocked based on server” to trigger special handling in Firefox 3
“Flash borders” in list of blockable elements will stay longer (forum thread)

Known issues

~~K-Meleon: Context menu entries not always shown~~
K-Meleon: Not working with K-Meleon 1.5 Alpha 2 due to a K-Meleon bug (bug 978)

Status update on adblockplus.org · 2008-04-02 15:31 by Wladimir Palant

Apparently, one of the scripts used by adblockplus.org was putting considerable load on the server (actually tiny load but it was invoked every time somebody downloaded EasyList). Unfortunately, the provider didn’t communicate that to me so that I didn’t know of any load issues until the server got overloaded yesterday and the provider disabled adblockplus.org. The problem is now fixed and the server load is acceptable again. However, I will probably still have to move to a different server — NetDepot isn’t comfortable sponsoring hosting for a project of this size.

Adblock Plus Watcher: first try · 2008-03-24 01:55 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus Watcher can be opened either from the Adblock Plus menu or with the Ctrl+Shift+M keyboard shortcut. It will show all requests processed by Adblock Plus and some technical information in a list that can be filtered as necessary.

Note: This is a diagnostic extension meant mostly for investigating of Adblock Plus related issues. It will be useless to most.

Shortcut keys are hard · 2008-03-24 00:44 by Wladimir Palant

When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.

What software update isn't · 2008-03-23 22:11 by Wladimir Palant

Having read John Lilly’s post on Apple’s software update I think I’ll stay away from Apple’s software in future. Commenters confirm that iTunes offering Safari as a “software update” is not an exception, it rather has been a company policy to push unrelated products in software updates — e.g. QuickTime updates offer you to install iTunes as well. And I agree, this is very, very wrong. I expect software update to keep my computer safe and up-to-date, not sneak some crap onto it I don’t need. I am already extremely annoyed by Windows Update nagging me about Microsoft’s malware removal tool each month even if I don’t have it installed. Now Apple is doing the same thing, and I don’t think it is funny.

More Firefox 3 fixes · 2008-03-21 23:53 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Whitelisting rules now apply to element hiding rules as well (bug 14814) (won’t work properly in Firefox 3, see known issues)
Added support for new content types previously listed as “other” (Firefox 3 only): XBL bindings, link pings, XML HTTP requests, object subrequests and DTDs (corresponding filter options are xbl, ping, xmlhttprequest, object-subrequest and dtd respectively)
Fixed: Error messages when inserting filters in Preferences
Fixed: Account for new XUL iframe behavior in Firefox 3 (documents load in invisible iframes as well now)

Known issues

Element hiding hits are not always registered in Firefox 3, this always prevents whitelisting rules to apply to element hiding
~~Songbird: Status bar icon doesn’t react to clicks (Songbird bug 6719)~~

Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 2008-03-17 23:09 by Wladimir Palant

Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.

TomTom HOME and add-ons · 2008-03-17 10:17 by Wladimir Palant

I have been writing very little about what I am doing in my day job, maybe it is time to change this. As some might know, I am a developer in the team behind TomTom HOME, an application that allows users to manage their TomTom navigator devices (e.g. installing new content on them, sharing it with other users or doing backups).

Great Java news · 2008-02-25 12:56 by Wladimir Palant

It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.

Statistics, statistics, statistics · 2008-02-19 12:39 by Wladimir Palant

Of course, we all knew that Addons.Mozilla.Org was sitting on a huge pile of statistically usable data. But honestly, I never really believed we would ever see a significant amount of it. Do you remember that server that would pull publicly accessible extension download counts from AMOv2 every day and display the data in graphs? I missed that one a lot now that the download counts are considered private.