Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Shortcut keys are hard · 2008-03-24 00:44 by Wladimir Palant
When I wrote the first Adblock Plus version two years ago, I already knew that keyboard shortcuts are trouble. Using a “simple” keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+B was pretty much impossible — basically all these keys were already in use by the browser. Yet most of the more complicated “Ctrl+Shift+…” shortcut keys were still free and could be used by extensions. Of course, all extensions shared the same browser window and would eventually clash with their shortcut key definitions, but one could expect that to happen on relatively rare occasions (and the shortcut keys were made configurable just for that reason). Still, I decided to use only two shortcut keys to reduce the probability of issues — original Adblock extension had five. And for two years Adblock Plus answered to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Shift+B.
What software update isn't · 2008-03-23 22:11 by Wladimir Palant
Having read John Lilly’s post on Apple’s software update I think I’ll stay away from Apple’s software in future. Commenters confirm that iTunes offering Safari as a “software update” is not an exception, it rather has been a company policy to push unrelated products in software updates — e.g. QuickTime updates offer you to install iTunes as well. And I agree, this is very, very wrong. I expect software update to keep my computer safe and up-to-date, not sneak some crap onto it I don’t need. I am already extremely annoyed by Windows Update nagging me about Microsoft’s malware removal tool each month even if I don’t have it installed. Now Apple is doing the same thing, and I don’t think it is funny.
Upgraded to Textpattern 4.0.6 · 2008-03-17 23:09 by Wladimir Palant
Yet another Textpattern upgrade (yes, I am slow), and again I have to expect that it will break something. Textpattern developers don’t seem to have a concept of stable versions and change the already fragile markup module with every minor version. So if you notice something odd on this site, it is probably just broken because of this upgrade — please tell me then.
TomTom HOME and add-ons · 2008-03-17 10:17 by Wladimir Palant
I have been writing very little about what I am doing in my day job, maybe it is time to change this. As some might know, I am a developer in the team behind TomTom HOME, an application that allows users to manage their TomTom navigator devices (e.g. installing new content on them, sharing it with other users or doing backups).
Great Java news · 2008-02-25 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
It appears that Sun released a beta version of their new Java plugin, much earlier than I expected. The important thing is: this plugin no longer relies on the ancient OJI code in Mozilla’s codebase to implement things like LiveConnect (integration between JavaScript and Java applets). Instead, the new plugin uses the same scripting interfaces as all other plugins as well. This will reduce the number of issues significantly — nobody really felt responsible for the complex OJI code lately, and Adblock Plus seemed to trigger lots of issues. I guess that OJI will still stay around at least in Firefox 3 but it will no longer be used, and maybe in Firefox 4 it will be removed entirely.
Statistics, statistics, statistics · 2008-02-19 12:39 by Wladimir Palant
Of course, we all knew that Addons.Mozilla.Org was sitting on a huge pile of statistically usable data. But honestly, I never really believed we would ever see a significant amount of it. Do you remember that server that would pull publicly accessible extension download counts from AMOv2 every day and display the data in graphs? I missed that one a lot now that the download counts are considered private.
Releases now tagged in CVS · 2008-02-11 21:58 by Wladimir Palant
Apparently, some people want Adblock Plus releases to be clearly marked in CVS. So I tagged all past releases of Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper — future releases should be tagged automatically. So, if you want to know what the source code looked like when Adblock Plus 0.7.2 was released, here it is.
Vulnerability or feature? · 2008-02-06 15:50 by Wladimir Palant
pdp over at GNUCITIZEN claims to have found a vulnerability in some common OpenID libraries. And I really tried hard to understand what he means and how it is related to the title of the article. In the end, I got the impression that he simply explains in a lengthy way that anybody could run an OpenID server and use it to log into OpenID-enabled services without having to register. Now isn’t this the whole purpose of OpenID?
Adblock Plus for MicroB - great, but... · 2007-12-28 00:20 by Wladimir Palant
Today I looked at my logs and noticed lots of unusual referrer spam. For example, I saw people coming to adblockplus.org from wikipedia.org — not a particular article but the main site. Adblock Plus is not that famous yet so I investigated a little.
Keeping an eye on plugins · 2007-12-15 01:00 by Wladimir Palant
It seems that one critical aspect of browsing is finally getting the much deserved attention: plugins. As a regular browser user you are hardly ever reminded of their existence, yet over time I learned that they have a very significant impact on browser’s stability and memory usage. For Adblock Plus, a significant percentage of all reported issues is related to plugins. Part of the problem is the fact that plugins are basically independent programs and the browser has hardly any control over what they do.