Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Comments are now automatically disabled after 6 weeks · 2010-11-24 15:42 by Wladimir Palant

For a long time the policy for this blog was: comments are always welcome. However, I noticed that there are some discussions going on in several years old blog posts that I am not really following any more. And I started thinking: what was the last time that a genuinely useful comment was received on an older blog post? I mean, a comment that wasn’t spam, off-topic, rehashing of arguments that have been mentioned years ago, something that would be better off in the forum. And I don’t remember when this happened the last time. Typically, all the useful comments arrive in the first few weeks after the article is posted and after that it’s only stuff that nobody will ever read (not even me). So: sorry, comments will now be automatically disabled on blog posts that are older than 6 weeks. If somebody stumbles upon my blog by following a random link, he/she is probably better off creating a forum post rather than commenting in the blog.

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Newsletter for subscription authors #1: Adblock Plus 1.3 and beyond · 2010-11-09 17:16 by Wladimir Palant

This mail provides important information for filter subscription authors about Adblock Plus 1.3, changes expected in Adblock Plus 1.4 release and Firefox 4.

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Status update: 2010-11-05 · 2010-11-05 21:12 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4 days on Adblock Plus this week. The releases on Tuesday/Wednesday were very stressful, so I am slowing down.

Done

  • Adblock Plus 1.3/1.3.1, Element Hiding Helper 1.1, Diagnostics 1.1.3 released
  • Fixed a few minor issues reported for these releases, nothing critical so far
  • Created an extension to generate Adblock Plus screenshots, used it to update screenshots/“translate” them to more languages
  • Caught up with forum/email again, somewhat

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Expected server downtime · 2010-11-05 14:02 by Wladimir Palant

The server will be unreachable for some time later today. This is necessary to move adblockplus.org to a more powerful server which should hopefully resolve the connectivity issues lately. Everything should be done within 30 minutes. However, it might happen that the IP address of the server changes — in this case it will take a while until everybody can reach the server again (due to DNS caching).

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Status update: 2010-10-30 · 2010-10-31 10:04 by Wladimir Palant

Done

  • Major update to Element Hiding Helper code and architecture
  • Added Shift+Mousewheel handling to Element Hiding Helper, also lock/unlock command
  • Finalized Element Hiding Helper strings, translations started
  • A little eye candy for Element Hiding Helper — better styling for hotkey labels
  • Release candidates for Adblock Plus 1.3, Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Diagnostics 1.1.3 are done (the latter has no real changes, turned out none were necessary)
  • Russian translation for Adblock Plus, Russian and German translations for Element Hiding Helper (with some help from forum.mozilla-russia.org users)
  • Coordinated translations on Babelzilla, made sure the released locales are free of errors (way too many translations still unfinished however)
  • Dropped Indonesian, Malay and Brasilian Portuguese locales from this Adblock Plus release, these weren’t even updated for Adblock Plus 1.2

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Dropping support for Firefox 3.0 · 2010-10-25 14:37 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus 1.3 will be using a simpler and faster module to manage preferences. This module isn’t in Adblock Plus development builds yet but it is already used in the latest Element Hiding Helper build. As it turned out, this module isn’t working properly in Firefox 3.0 due to some JavaScript engine bug. It’s not clear which bug it is and whether it has a simple work-around. Frankly, I am not very inclined to spend time researching historical bugs in Bugzilla. Instead, Adblock Plus 1.3 and Element Hiding Helper 1.1 will no longer support Firefox 3.0. Anybody still using Firefox 3.0 should be reminded that Mozilla ended support for Firefox 3.0 in March 2010, and by now it has a large number of known and unpatched security issues — using it to browse the web is not safe. I highly recommend updating to the latest Firefox release (currently Firefox 3.6).

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Status update: 2010-10-22 · 2010-10-23 12:56 by Wladimir Palant

Done

  • Issue reporter client-side implementation
  • Started beta phase for Adblock Plus
  • Finalized Adblock Plus strings, translators started working
  • Added third/first party indicator to document source column in blockable items
  • Changed build system to centralize extension metadata in one file (particularly to allow generating homepage links for available languages automatically)
  • Updated German translation (thanks to MonztA for proofreading)
  • Rearchitectured Element Hiding Helper, made it more like Adblock Plus
  • Changed configuration of Element Hiding Helper hotkeys to allow specifying multiple hotkeys (Ctrl-Shift-S is now used if Ctrl-Shift-K is taken)
  • A few minor changes to Element Hiding Helper filter composer

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Status Update: 2010-10-15 · 2010-10-18 13:06 by Wladimir Palant

Done

  • First draft of a privacy policy page is under discussion
  • Some issue reporter polishing (particularly handling of transmission errors)
  • Tons of Firefox 4 work after JavaScript compartments landing — filed bugs on three issues, fixed an issue in Adblock Plus, worked around another issue affecting Element Hiding Helper
  • New icon to indicate slow filters (a developer doing graphical design — it’s an admirable attempt, you must give me that at least)

In progress

  • Handling of special cases in issue reporter (e.g. users without filter subscriptions)

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Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper issues in current Firefox nightlies · 2010-10-18 12:01 by Wladimir Palant

A few days ago an important and much anticipated change landed for the Firefox nightlies: JavaScript compartments. In theory, this should improve performance and security without having any side-effects whatsoever. This is a very radical change to the JavaScript engine architecture however and it caused a number of regressions of course. Some of them affect Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper extensions, I better list them before more bug reports are filed against Adblock Plus. Right now you can only hit these issues if you are using the latest Firefox nightly builds, not Firefox 4 Beta 6 however. I hope that the most critical issues will be resolved before Firefox 4 Beta 7.

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New EasyList website live · 2010-10-11 09:11 by Wladimir Palant

Some might have noticed that the EasyList website hasn’t changed much in the past three years, it really needed to get a face lift. Michael has been working on a new website version for the past three months and now it is finally live. This should make finding EasyList-related information significantly easier. Also, the new website is available in two languages (English and German) with a third language (French) being planned.

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