Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Downloading a file regularly - how hard can it be? · 2010-05-11 11:06 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve been playing a little with numbers to find a way to get filter subscription downloads distributed equally throughout the week. You probably guessed it from the title of this post, getting the desired behavior isn’t quite easy.
Status of the Adblock Plus project, spring 2010 · 2010-05-06 22:11 by Wladimir Palant
With Adblock Plus 1.2 being released and many other things going on I felt that it would be useful to give a summary of where we are now and what are the areas that we need to focus on next. I am not sure whether it is something I would publish regularly, maybe.
New info page for development builds · 2010-05-06 10:52 by Wladimir Palant
Most people using development builds no longer update them manually, reading development build announcements isn’t absolutely necessary either. It was time to update the website to consider these changed circumstances — requiring people looking for a download link to open a blog post doesn’t make sense any more. Instead I created an info page that people are send to when they click on “development builds” link. I tried to keep it short yet still give all the important information (and yes, I still consider some information more important than the installation link which is why I put it first). Subscribing to the announcements is merely a recommendation now.
New "Known issues" page · 2010-04-27 13:25 by Wladimir Palant
With the “known issues” section of release changelogs growing constantly lately I felt that moving it to a separate page would serve the cause better. This will allow us to link the the issue in question directly rather than saying “look at the end of the known issues section”, also the description can be more detailed without space restrictions. I put up a first version of this page, any comments? Can you think of other common issues that should be mentioned there?
Ah, that wonderful Flash installation experience... · 2010-04-22 10:57 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, I am not the only one who noticed that the Flash installation experience has turned from bad to worse. Paul O’Shannessy uses pretty strong language to describe the procedure but I think it is justified. Until recently you could ignore all the bells and whistles and still download the executable which would then install Flash (and only Flash, regardless of the pre-checked crap that you might have forgotten to uncheck). Now you have to install the Adobe DLM extension (never mind that plug-in installation doesn’t usually require a browser restart) and there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid it. Still wonder why so many people want to see Flash obsoleted by HTML5?
NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED status in nsIHttpChannel · 2010-03-19 09:17 by Wladimir Palant
Dear Lazyweb! Do you have any idea why XMLHttpRequest might fail with channel.status being NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED? This seems to be happening consistently for some Adblock Plus users when downloading https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. This issue is happening on all platforms and across all supported Firefox versions (I see 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 in the logs).
The unnecesary Ars Technica rant · 2010-03-16 16:25 by Wladimir Palant
Please forgive me this (hopefully unusual) rant. It is simply that I am so disappointed. Over the years I learned that quality journalism is extremely rare. I also came to expect very little from the media (both online and offline) — most often, journalists fail at what I consider the very basics of their job, namely understanding what they are writing about and verifying the information (I very much appreciate the exceptions to that rule but they are just that — exceptions). No problem, if it is important I can usually find the original source and get myself an overview. As it is, getting me disappointed is hard. But apparently not impossible.
Help needed: guide for new subscription authors · 2010-03-12 16:10 by Wladimir Palant
I had to guide a few people through the process of setting up a new filter list recently, this reminded me that documentation for new subscription authors is long overdue. Unfortunately, explaining everything necessary isn’t exactly simple and I don’t have the time to write this document. Which is why I want to ask for your help. I created a Google document where I listed the points that I feel should be mentioned. Maybe there are some more points that I forgot but either way: they need to be fleshed out.
The devastating effects of ad blocking · 2010-03-08 15:08 by Wladimir Palant
A few years ago I used to blog about some of the more ridiculous claims that ad blocking opponents make and take them apart. Fortunately, I no longer have to. Other people do this now and they are much more successful expressing their opinions. So I don’t really need to write about the recent article at Ars Technica on the effects of ad blocking. I do so mostly to link to the responses so that I can find them again.
Content Security Policy enabled on adblockplus.org · 2010-03-05 13:09 by Wladimir Palant
If you are using Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 (Mozilla Developer Preview) or even Firefox nightly builds then your browser already supports Content Security Policy. This is a mechanism to prevent attacks on a website like Cross-Site Scripting or Clickjacking. While I believe that adblockplus.org isn’t vulnerable to any of these attacks, I certainly like having an additional layer of protection and switched on Content Security Policy on this site. A possible side-effect is that some things which used to work fine might fail to load now — if you see something like that please let me know.