Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Status update: 2010-12-23 · 2010-12-24 20:25 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Released Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.0.22, 1.0.23, 1.0.24
Investigated numerous issues reported after release, we should have an overview of what needs fixing now
Added support for X-Do-Not-Track header in Adblock Plus nightlies
Released Adblock Plus 1.3.3

Status update: 2010-12-19 · 2010-12-19 21:57 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Finished security review of Anwiki, all XSS holes should be plugged now
Set up rsync to be used for distributing EasyList instead of CVS
A few more minor fixes for Adblock Plus/Chrome, updated subscriptions metadata
Released two Adblock Plus/Chrome development builds (manually for now)
Created forum area for Google Chrome users, updated link in the extension
Investigated a bunch of Java-related issues, filed Mozilla bug 619349 and Mozilla bug 619399.
Investigated WebKit bug 45586 which is hurting Adblock Plus/Chrome a lot.
Reverted making subscription downloads “anonymous” (a change that went into Adblock Plus 1.3.2), turns out this breaks password-protected downloads as well as downloads through some proxy servers.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome to be released soon · 2010-12-15 18:52 by Wladimir Palant

For a while my official position on Adblock Plus for non-Gecko browsers read like this:

Forget it, I am not writing Adblock Plus from scratch just to support your favorite browser (be it Chrome or Safari or Opera or Internet Explorer). And even if somebody gives me the code — I am not going to maintain two unrelated projects. This asks for an independent project and in fact, there are already independent projects to implement ad blocking for all of these browsers.

As you can read from this, the frequent requests to port Adblock Plus to <insert your favorite browser here> got quite annoying. Still, it is time to change this position, we are starting to look into ways to cover other browsers than Firefox and SeaMonkey. And we are starting with Google Chrome, a beta version of Adblock Plus for Google Chrome is scheduled to be released soon. I’ll try to give answers to some questions that you are certainly urging to ask.

Status update: 2010-12-10 · 2010-12-15 18:51 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Using JSHydra for automated code rewriting, seems to work correctly on all Adblock Plus modules now and can be used to generate Chrome-compatible code
Updated Adblock Plus for Chrome code — now using current Adblock Plus code instead of a one year old snapshot
Fixed a bunch of minor issues in Adblock Plus for Chrome (most importantly: made it work with XHTML documents)
Switched to newer Drag&Drop API in Preferences dialog (yes, Gecko 1.9.0 no longer needs to be supported)
Released Adblock Plus 1.3.2

Finding security issues in a website (or: How to get paid by Google) · 2010-12-11 01:40 by Wladimir Palant

I received a payment over $2,500 from Google today. Now the conspiracy theorists among you can go off and rant in all forums that Adblock Plus is sponsored by Google and can no longer be trusted. For those of you who are still with me: the money came though Google’s Vulnerability Reward Program. Recently Google extended the scope of the program to web applications. I took up the challenge and sure enough, in a few hours I found four vulnerabilities in various corners of google.com.

Status update: 2010-12-03 · 2010-12-08 00:44 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Changed plans for Adblock Plus 1.3.5 — a release in December is unrealistic
Investigated an issue breaking Java applets when Adblock Plus is installed, probably the same one that is being reported for Pogo.com. Filed bug 616106.
Got rid of “invalid XBL binding” warning in Firefox 4
Made sure leak testing tools don’t get confused by Adblock Plus (reporting a non-existent leak)
Spent some time investigating the memory leak I am observing in my Firefox — couldn’t find anything with the tools I tried, still unsure whether this leak is related to Adblock Plus
Tried improving 16×16 Adblock Plus icon (will become the most used icon in Firefox 4), with very little success
Started looking into JSHydra for automated code rewriting

Rewriting JavaScript code with JSHydra · 2010-12-07 20:15 by Wladimir Palant

I was thinking about possible ways to rewrite Adblock Plus code automatically. One way to use it would be the online tool to find redundant filters. Due to its use of Adblock Plus code (which requires JavaScript 1.7) this tool would only work in Firefox. I didn’t really want to give up the convenient features of JavaScript 1.7, neither did I want to fork my code for this web tool which I would need to sync up regularly. Automated rewriting is really the only option but it is usually too complicated.

Status update: 2010-11-26 · 2010-11-26 20:49 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4.5 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Finished refactoring of Python scripts used on adblockplus.org. From what I can tell, security best practices are followed everywhere so I made the corresponding Mercurial repository visible.
Added more information to status reports that will hopefully make dealing with pop-ups easier.
Disallowed sending issue reports with some configurations to prevent useless reports.
Implemented a faster filter matching algorithm (filter subscriptions need to adapt before we get all the performance advantages here).
Set up an Anwiki instance for easylist.adblockplus.org (still needs some theme tuning, this is up to Michael).
Finally reproduced and fixed the issue with element hiding rules not applying after an exception (regression in Adblock Plus 1.3)
Fixed script generating nightly builds: removing old builds worked incorrectly and caused the script to remove a 1.3.5a build while leaving 1.3a builds in the directory.

Status update: 2010-11-19 · 2010-11-26 16:35 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Added a way to change status of a issue reports, with an optional notification sent out to the user.
Improved sorting of report columns.
More discussions on issue reporter improvements.

In progress

Refactoring of Python scripts used on adblockplus.org to make them easier to change and maintain.

Status update: 2010-11-14 · 2010-11-26 16:21 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Subscription authors are now getting notifications about new issue reports, choosing between daily and weekly digests is also possible.
Added sorting functionality to report columns.
Implemented a bunch of improvements to the digest emails to allow spotting “good” reports more easily.
Discussed a bunch of other improvement proposals for issue reports.
Looked into issues that people using icon with text are experiencing – found an undocumented solution, let’s hope that it won’t break with the next Firefox release.
Fixed toolbar icon in SeaMonkey Mail nightlies (nobody reported this issue, I guess nobody noticed?).