Adblock Plus and (a little) more
The wrong way of allowing users to make informed decisions · 2011-04-13 15:15 by Wladimir Palant
One point I probably didn’t stress often enough in my previous blog posts on AMO‘s add-on performance measurements is how poorly percentages reflect the real effect of add-ons. At least I see no indication that the people responsible for this campaign intend to change their mind and provide users with more accurate information. Please allow me to explain once again why these numbers are misleading (bug 648742 reworded).
Overview for Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-11 16:55 by Wladimir Palant
I got tired of digging through logs so I created an overview page for AMO’s add-on performance testing results. This shows both the absolute slowdown values as well as percentages for each operating system, along with a link to the corresponding logs. It also shows the standard deviation for each test and flags results that are affected by issues known so far.
Overview of my bug reports on add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-09 19:52 by Wladimir Palant
In a comment to my previous blog post Jorge Villalobos asked me to file bugs on everything I think is wrong with the add-on performance measurements. So that’s what I did. The resulting list is long and I didn’t feel like creating a tracking bug so I better list the bugs in a blog post so that everybody (especially me) can find them.
On fluctuations in performance testing results · 2011-04-08 10:25 by Wladimir Palant
Yesterday I concluded that (with all bugs fixed) the results of Mozilla’s add-on performance measurements shouldn’t fluctuate by more than 2% of the Firefox startup time. Sorry, I was wrong. Later that day I noticed Read It Later, currently #43 on that list, supposedly causing 4% slower Firefox startup times. Yet this extension was definitely disabled during performance testing due to bug 648229. Does this now mean that each disabled add-on causes a 4% performance impact? Definitely not, disabled add-ons have no measurable effect on performance. So digging up the raw numbers for that add-on was definitely a good idea.
How reliable are Mozilla's performance measurements? · 2011-04-07 15:38 by Wladimir Palant
One of the replies to my previous blog post prompted me to take a closer look at the raw data from the add-on performance measurements. Can the numbers displayed on the blame list be trusted at all?
Some more details on Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-06 14:35 by Wladimir Palant
Mozilla Add-ons recently published an article on their effort to recognize slow add-ons. It comes complete with a list of worst offenders. Some media already picked up on that article and users are listening up. So everything is progressing nicely towards the goal — pressure on developers starts building up, I already had something like 10 people point out to me that Adblock Plus is number 12 on that list.
Taking a vacation from work with the community · 2011-04-06 00:24 by Wladimir Palant
Last week was very hard on me. I had to work under much pressure to fix several critical issues discovered immediately after Adblock Plus 1.3.5 release. At the same time the Adblock Plus community which used to be a great motivator seemed to go out of its way to demotivate me:
Do Not Track support in Adblock Plus [Updated] · 2011-03-25 23:22 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3.5 has been released today. One of the new features is support for the Do Not Track proposal which was previously only available in development builds. Given that this feature is not obvious I want to answer some questions.
Firefox 4 is there! · 2011-03-22 19:05 by Wladimir Palant
And since there are not enough blog posts about Firefox 4 on Planet, I am going to remind you that Firefox 4 is available now and you should go get it while it is hot. Seriously, do it. Lots of work went into this release and Firefox 4 is a huge step forward.
The plan for Adblock Plus 1.3.5 · 2011-03-19 14:53 by Wladimir Palant
The development build users noticed already — Adblock Plus 1.3.5 release is coming close, the current development build is already designated as a “release candidate”. With the release of Firefox 4 (both desktop and mobile) I thought that we need to release soon as well. One issue that people are complaining is the shortcut key for Adblock Plus preferences — in Firefox 4 it conflicts with the Panorama shortcut key. More important however is the support for Firefox Mobile 4.0 (Fennec). Thanks to some great help from Fabrice Desré I was able to add support in a very short time and we need to release it now. So yesterday I started string freeze for Adblock Plus 1.3.5, the plan is to release on March 25th.
Update (2011-03-22): I am getting close to a working Firefox Sync support. However, I am now certain that landing it for Adblock Plus 1.3.5 will be too risky. Instead these changes should land shortly after Adblock Plus 1.3.5 and will be available in the development builds. We can do one more release once things look stable.