Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Einbürgerung in den deutschen Staatsverband - im Detail · 2011-02-28 00:06 by Wladimir Palant

This lengthy German-language blog post deals with the issues of the German naturalization process and should be irrelevant to most people not living in Germany.

Diese Woche gab es hier ein wichtiges Ereignis: meine Frau hat endlich die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft bekommen. Ich konnte den Prozess von Anfang an miterleben und sehen, wie das heutzutage abläuft. Da es aber kaum deutschsprachige Beschreibungen dazu gibt, denke ich nicht, dass sich allzu viele meiner deutschen Mitbürger damit auskennen. Ich schreibe es einfach hier auf, vielleicht gibt es dann bei der nächsten Debatte um die Einbürgerung weniger schlecht informierte Meinungen.

Changes to the Adblock Plus release process (or why the new version isn't available on addons.mozilla.org) · 2011-02-16 15:08 by Wladimir Palant

A while ago there was an announcement that AMO would try to reduce the number of “trusted” add-ons (meaning: add-ons where an update would immediately become available without review). The old approach was to mark add-ons as “trusted” if they are popular and go through a thorough testing process before each release. The new approach is to grant this status only if absolutely needed. Obviously, Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper no longer match the definition of a “trusted” add-on and so this status has been revoked now.

No more status updates · 2011-02-04 20:53 by Wladimir Palant

I haven’t been publishing status updates for a while now. Reason is that the system doesn’t quite seem to work for me. Summarizing at the end of the week works well if I was focused on a few major tasks the whole week, on a chaotic week with lots of multitasking however I often simply don’t remember any more and wonder where the time has gone. Also, the next tasks that I list tend to get reprioritized, the list is often already outdated by the start of next week.

Updated roadmap (Adblock Plus 1.3.5) · 2011-02-04 17:07 by Wladimir Palant

I’ve just put Adblock Plus 1.3.5 on the roadmap. I mentioned this release a bunch of times but wasn’t sure whether we are actually going to release it or whether we will go to Adblock Plus 1.4 immediately. Now we have some nice improvements in the development builds (DNT header support, faster filter matching and startup, less memory used for element hiding) and releasing these improvements before Adblock Plus 1.4 definitely seems worth it. This is what Adblock Plus 1.3.5 will be about, a bunch of improvements under the hood that will hopefully make live better for some people. Adblock Plus 1.4 on the other hand is planned as a major user interface redesign.

Why you do not want to use the LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag · 2011-01-30 15:49 by Wladimir Palant

When you are creating a Firefox extension you don’t need to use browser’s default settings when downloading something, you can choose from a number of load flags defined on the nsIRequest interface instead. Some of them are really useful, e.g. the flags controlling caching. And then there is LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag that sounds like a good idea for downloads of public files — after all, why should you allow cookies and such? Making user tracking possible isn’t the point here.

List of Adblock Plus/Chrome issues · 2011-01-25 11:32 by Wladimir Palant

I just created a known issues page for Adblock Plus/Chrome. So far I can think of three main issues that are being raised regularly and that we cannot do much about right now. Does anybody have more?

adblockplus.org back after a lengthy downtime [updated] · 2011-01-23 05:30 by Wladimir Palant

I just brought adblockplus.org back from the longest downtime in four years (around 30 hours). What happened is that I broke the server when trying to update the Linux distribution used. Now updating the distribution on a live server is a risky affair but the hosting provider has several protection layers in place so that I didn’t expect more than one hour downtime if things go badly.

Changes to development builds · 2011-01-08 13:03 by Wladimir Palant

Now that we need to produce development builds for Chrome the old Perl script generating development builds was getting somewhat too inflexible. It has been rewritten in Python and now I finished hooking up the new script. While it is still not generating Chrome builds (something to add early next week), there are already some changes for Firefox builds.

Status update: 2011-01-07 · 2011-01-07 19:15 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4.5 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Investigated issues with Flash objects staying hidden in Chrome, filed Chrome issue 68518, also implemented a work-around
Investigated some element hiding rules breaking Gmail in Chrome, filed Chrome issue 68705
Released Adblock Plus for Chrome 1.0.25
Investigated issues disabling filters from list of blockable items in Firefox 3.6 — caused by wrongly applied JavaScript wrappers, solution still outstanding
Investigated memory leak visible in my main profile again — with limited success
Finished up new script to create development builds — tested and checked into sitescripts repository, needs to be hooked up now

How does one approach an "unusual" memory leak? · 2011-01-06 18:05 by Wladimir Palant

Firefox memory usage used to be very stable for me, it reached 200 MB and stayed there. However, some time ago this changed and now I see memory usage close to 1 GB after using Firefox for a few days. This only seems to affect my main Firefox profile which doesn’t see too many changes. So I can name the primary suspects: a minor Firefox release or Adblock Plus 1.3. And I clearly don’t like seeing my extension on the suspects list, so I did everything I could to ensure that it isn’t leaking memory. However, neither Leak Monitor, nor leak gauge, nor direct code inspection did bring up anything suspicious.