Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Element hiding counters done · 2007-02-05 01:20 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Made matching element hiding rules appear in the list of blockable items
Added hit counts for element hiding rules
Added collapse and ~collapse filter options to override the global “Collapse blocked elements” option (the filter */banners/*$collapse will always collapse elements, */banners/*$~collapse will never collapse)
Replaced icons in the sidebar’s “State” column to make them better recognizable by colorblind people (opinions are welcome)

Mozilla hurting Google by recommending Adblock Plus? · 2007-02-01 15:12 by Wladimir Palant

Quite a few blogs picked up the idea that there is something strange about Mozilla recommending Adblock Plus. They quote Mozilla’s financial statement saying that Mozilla earned $50 million in 2005 from search engine cooperation (mostly Google though at least Yahoo contributed as well) which is indirectly income from advertisements.

Recognizing third-party content · 2007-01-31 16:07 by Wladimir Palant

I have done all the preparation work so that now I can finally implement the $third-party filter option allowing to restrict filters to third-party or same-party content. This would be used for filters like */banners/*$third-party — if some webmaster is crazy enough to call the directory with site logos “banners” those still won’t be blocked. This filter will only block something coming from the directory “banners” on a different server.

The Sorry State of Online Advertising · 2007-01-31 00:18 by Wladimir Palant

Advertising online is at an all-time low. Users are constantly bombarded by advertisements that seem to be getting larger and more visually obtrusive by the minute. Online advertisements seem to have little or nothing to do with the site’s content and lack any sense of respect for the user. Even though it is a well-known fact that internet users detest ads, the same horrendous model is shoved down their throats. It is as if site creators have just accepted that the advertising status quo is the only way to generate ad revenue and they expect that the users will have to “deal with it”.

Read The Sorry State of Online Advertising by P.J. Onori.

Element Hiding Helper: Find-As-You-Type fixed (take II) · 2007-01-30 22:34 by Wladimir Palant

Unlike the previous development build this one should work with browsers based on Gecko 1.8 as well.

Changes

Fixed: Hot keys trigger find-as-you-type and can be caught be web pages before they get to Element Hiding Helper

Cleaning up · 2007-01-30 14:23 by Wladimir Palant

I have been cleaning up, removing some parts that became unnecessary due to changes in the Adblock Plus core and altering other parts that can be implemented in a better way.

Changes

Removed useless “Block remote ads in local pages” option together with the corresponding extensions.adblockplus.blocklocalpages preference
Removed extensions.adblockplus.localschemes preference (generally blocking on all content pages now)
Removed “Not a remote page” message in sidebar and preferences dialog to be more consistent
No longer filling the list with default filters when patterns.ini doesn’t exist, offering subscriptions should be enough (extensions.adblockplus.patterns preference removed)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblockprefs and extensions.adblockplus.checkedadblocksync preferences (Adblock’s preferences are now only imported when patterns.ini doesn’t exist yet)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.grouporder preference (hardcoded now, no point in having this as a preference)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.linktypes preference (using a more general approach to recognize nodes that can have links)
Removed extensions.adblockplus.blocktypes preference (rules like *$stylesheet can be used to prevent a particular type from being blocked)
Removed mostly useless extensions.adblockplus.noncollapsabletypes preference
Removed exceptions for about:blank
Now ignoring effectively empty rows/cols attributes when collapsing frames in a frameset
Fixed: items with same address but different type always appear as one item in the list

Element Hiding Helper: Find-As-You-Type fixed · 2007-01-29 08:52 by Wladimir Palant

Changes

Fixed: Hot keys trigger find-as-you-type and can be caught be web pages before they get to Element Hiding Helper

Anatomy of ads · 2007-01-25 18:57 by Wladimir Palant

I would like to take a look at the different costs connected to ads. Most of the time, the only cost people consider is our attention — ads are designed to be distractive, they don’t let us concentrate on what we are doing. Jeff Atwood analyzed the space occupied by ads in comparison to content on a particular page and came to alarming results. I want to pick another page to look at the other aspects.

Element Hiding Helper 1.0 released · 2007-01-23 02:31 by Wladimir Palant

Features

Simple but powerful selection of the element to be hidden (thanks Aardvark)
Automatic generation of an element hiding rule based on specified criteria
Advanced mode for complicated rules, allows selecting attributes of parent and sibling nodes, attribute parts and custom CSS
Rules are applied immediately, with “Preview” switched on even during composing

Known issues

Preview feature doesn’t work in Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird
View source tooltip’s position and size is influenced by other tooltips
Wrong frame position and size for inline elements that are broken into multiple lines

A World of Endless Advertisements · 2007-01-22 03:29 by Wladimir Palant

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article on the craziness of internet advertising. I’m not commenting on it yet so just read it yourself: A World of Endless Advertisements. Don’t forget to read the comments. Some of my own thoughts on this topic: Ethics of blocking ads – part 3