Adblock Plus and (a little) more
XULRunner in large projects, part 3: Bugs, bugs, and more bugs · 2010-07-05 22:36 by Wladimir Palant
I already mentioned platform bugs in the previous article but this discussion is worth expanding. Fact is, with the XULRunner code base being rather huge you are bound to find bugs and inconsistencies if you only dig a little deeper. Most of them will be minor though some occasionally turn out mission critical.
XULRunner in large projects, part 2: Why XULRunner isn't like Java · 2010-07-04 12:53 by Wladimir Palant
When talking about runtimes people often expect XULRunner to be something like Java. Sometimes people will also mention .NET — if you are one of them feel free to replace the word “Java” but “.NET” everywhere in this article, it shouldn’t affect the meaning in any way. Fact is, XULRunner is very different from Java and I will try to explain why.
Yes, Adblock Plus is broken in the current Minefield · 2010-07-02 17:04 by Wladimir Palant
I expect lots of reports on this issue so I better publish an explanation before that happens. Yes, starting with Minefield build 20100702 Adblock Plus won’t work any more — neither the stable version nor the development builds. This is due to huge changes in the Gecko platform which were announced a few weeks ago.
XULRunner in large projects, part 1: What is that "XULRunner" thingy, anyway? · 2010-07-02 03:25 by Wladimir Palant
I applied to lead a session on XULRunner in large software projects at the Mozilla Summit. Unfortunately, that proposal was rejected, no talk for me at the summit. Yet there is apparently some interest in the topic, I got messages from two people who won’t be attending the summit asking for slides. I won’t create any slides but I decided to share my thoughts on the topics I wanted to discuss. Having spent the last three years building XULRunner-based applications (first TomTom HOME, now Songbird) I have some experience in this area. Still, this will be necessarily a one-sided view so don’t hesitate to comment.
JavaScript modules in a JAR file - finally! · 2010-06-18 10:45 by Wladimir Palant
I don’t know why nobody announced this yet, a very important change landed on mozilla-central a few days ago. JavaScript modules can now be located in JAR files and loaded directly via chrome:// URLs. So an extension can now keep its modules in the JAR file along with all the other code.
Redundant filter finder updated · 2010-06-12 02:56 by Wladimir Palant
I updated the tool to find useless filters, the new version uses new code from Adblock Plus and better considers filter options. Element hiding rules are left unchanged as before — I am not aware of any way to detect redundancies there. Please report any abnormalities you notice in the new version, there might still be bugs.
Impact of Adblock Plus on startup time - revisited · 2010-06-10 02:31 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago Taras Glek blogged about extensions having a significant impact on browser’s startup time. One of the extensions he measured was Adblock Plus 1.1.3 and it didn’t make a good figure. Originally I thought that significantly optimizing Adblock Plus initialization wasn’t possible but I then found that using lazy evaluation for some values improved the performance of Adblock Plus 1.2 quite significantly. So I decided to check what things look like now.
The wrong way to deal with privacy concerns · 2010-05-26 14:30 by Wladimir Palant
Generally, I am not the guy to pick on Google. I think that they usually bring out very solid (often brilliant) solutions and do a good job on the privacy front (meaning: far from perfect but significantly better than the competition). All the more surprising was their release of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which doesn’t quite live up to the expected quality.
Renaming extensions · 2010-05-21 11:24 by Wladimir Palant
Some people using development builds probably noticed already: the full name of Element Hiding Helper is no longer “Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper” but rather “Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus”. Given that some people are still confusing Element Hiding Helper with Adblock Plus this change is long overdue. The only reason it hasn’t been implemented earlier is that the new name is no longer language-neutral, it needs to be translated into various languages. But that’s something that can be done now. Element Hiding Helper also got its own icon which is slightly different from the Adblock Plus icon.
More roadmaps · 2010-05-19 22:17 by Wladimir Palant
The roadmap page now lists the roadmap for Element Hiding Helper and Adblock Plus Watcher extensions. There is usually little planning for these extensions but since there is some now I decided to add it to the roadmap and see how it works out.