Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Status Update: 2010-10-08 · 2010-10-08 23:08 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- New About Adblock Plus page is live and ready for translating
- First drafts of the new homepage and system requirements page are under discussion
- Improved filter matching performance by 20-35%
- Went through submitted issue reports to identify missing data, added pop-up opener and an optional contact email address
- Investigated options to embed JavaScript into Python – very sad story
Status Update: 2010-10-01 · 2010-10-02 00:54 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Landed issue reporter, fixed tons of small problems there, improved code quality, added more data and a list of recently submitted reports — looks solid now.
- Changed suggestions in the filter composer — protocol is no longer part of the suggestion.
- Added a warning to the filter composer, displayed if the custom pattern no longer matches the address it was supposed to block.
- Implemented and evaluated a faster filter matching algorithm proposed by lyricconch. Added to the Adblock Plus 1.4 roadmap.
- Updated the roadmap, especially defined the major items for Adblock Plus 1.4.
Status Update: 2010-09-24 · 2010-09-24 18:30 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Scripts to receive and display issue reports on the server side
- Made sure links to documentation in Adblock Plus no longer need to be translated — the extension now uses a new entry point on adblockplus.org, the user is redirected to the correct language version if it exists.
- Updated to Anwiki 0.2.3, will try to stay on stable releases from now on
- Rewrote subscription handling scripts to use Python instead of Perl
In progress
- Sending in reports about filter issues — will be in the next development build but more work is necessary.
Status Update: 2010-09-17 · 2010-09-17 19:07 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Removed leftovers of the old website, unified navigation menu in different parts of the website.
- Finally updated Textpattern now that the only thing depending on it is this blog.
- Improved Anwiki sync so that www repository contains individual changes along with all the necessary information now.
- Significantly improved startup performance of Adblock Plus (found a way to speed up Gecko’s processing of the element hiding stylesheet).
- Changed externally added subscriptions so that they no longer persist, updated public interface documentation.
In progress
- Sending in reports about filter issues — made some progress on the client side, the usual scenario is almost done (screenshots).
Redesigning Adblock Plus preferences dialog · 2010-09-13 17:37 by Wladimir Palant
Some of you probably don’t know, Future development is the part of the Adblock Plus forum where change proposals to Adblock Plus, this website and other extensions like Element Hiding Helper are discussed. You cannot create new topics there but interesting proposals from other forum parts will be moved. I am writing all this because I created a new topic there a few minutes ago: Redesigning preferences dialog. The lengthy post lists six change proposals which will hopefully make your life better. If you are interested feel free to comment in the forum (no registration required but you might want to register to get reply notifications). Please have understanding that off-topic discussions in this forum part will be removed.
Status Update: 2010-09-10 · 2010-09-10 18:05 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Filed more Anwiki bugs and fixed some of them, adjusted more things around the new website. It seems to be stable now so that I switched it live (caching and sharing accounts with the forum work fine).
- Got confirmation from Mozilla that bug 564667 will not be fixed for Firefox 4. Managed find a work-around nevertheless and created an impressive pile of hacks. Decided not to stop pursuing this in the end and dropped installation without browser restart from the roadmap.
New adblockplus.org website is live now · 2010-09-10 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
The new Anwiki-based adblockplus.org website is live now. As I said before, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes yet, it is mostly about switching to a more flexible technology. To log in you use the same user name and password as for the forum — however, users with less than 5 forum posts will need to be cleared by me first (sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t want to have spammers edit texts on this website). Some things still need to be polished but so far the new website appears to be running well.
How many hacks does it take to make your extension install without a restart? · 2010-09-10 15:50 by Wladimir Palant
Dave Townsend did some really great work on the add-on manager recently, he managed to completely rewrite the old crappy backend code and replace it with something far more sane. Along the way a new feature was added: starting with Firefox 4 some add-ons should be able to opt-in and install/uninstall without requiring a browser restart. This feature was primarily meant for JetPack-built extensions but is generally open to all other extensions as well. I tried enabling this feature for Adblock Plus and found that there is an awful number of catches attached to it.
Status Update: 2010-09-03 · 2010-09-04 02:56 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Finished migrating all website content into Anwiki and made sure it is fully functional.
Yes, pretty much nothing else this week. That’s nine new Anwiki bugs filed, a few dozen webpages edited to remove differences between languages (had to write my own comparison script since “content desynchronization” message from Anwiki wasn’t much help), two new content classes and a bunch more code changes to make sure everything works as expected.
New website version ready for testing · 2010-09-04 02:34 by Wladimir Palant
As many people probably noticed, the Adblock Plus website is urgently in need of some updates and rewriting. Unfortunately, making changes is too hard because the three language versions of the website need to be kept in sync. Some time ago we found Anwiki which (unlike Textpattern that is currently used) is specifically designed to handle content in multiple languages. You make the changes in one language and they automatically pop up in the other languages, marked as untranslated. And creating new translations of existing pages is trivial. And links to untranslated pages will be automatically redirected to English. Just perfect.