Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Status update · 2007-08-26 21:04 by Wladimir Palant

You probably noticed that I have been very quiet lately — I only managed to reply a few of the incoming mails, almost didn’t comment in bug reports and didn’t visit the Adblock Plus forum at all. Main reason is that I finally moved with my wife to our own apartment in Cologne and we simply didn’t have Internet at home yet. This means that I only had Internet access at work where I had already enough to do with getting TomTom HOME 2.0 ready for a release.

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Get WebRunner 0.5 while it is hot! · 2007-07-11 12:00 by Wladimir Palant

I have been using WebRunner for a few weeks now, and it is pretty useful. It allows me to use some web applications independently from my browser — which makes sense, since these web applications have a user interface of their own and don’t require the full power of the browser. The web applications then appear in my taskbar with the correct icon instead of cluttering the browser with tabs. In addition, this allows the web applications to run constantly, even if I frequently restart my browser (which happens sometimes). And finally, I no longer need to be logged in at Google in my browser, one site less allowed to set permanent cookies.

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Getting application name and icon right with XULRunner · 2007-06-29 02:21 by Wladimir Palant

Despite a few disadvantages, XULRunner is a great tool for application development. The more disappointing it is when the very basic things fail: getting your application recognizable by its icon and application name. Setting icon and title for application’s windows is easy, and usually it is sufficient. However, Windows taskbar has the option “Group similar taskbar buttons” (enabled by default), and for a XULRunner application this group is displayed with XULRunner’s icon and the name “xulrunner”.

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Mozilla Developer Day: XUL vs. HTML · 2007-06-26 01:10 by Wladimir Palant

Mozilla Developer Day in Paris was great. I still cannot believe that I sat at the same table with Daniel Glazman and Benjamin Smedberg (but in our modern times there is proof). There were lots of people I always wanted to meet in person and many interesting talks. The Joost guys delivered a very impressive demo. But the best of it were the discussion sessions. 70 XUL developers in one room — this doesn’t happen too often.

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New job · 2007-06-15 17:49 by Wladimir Palant

I have been very silent recently, but I think it is time to give an update on what I am doing. Today is officially the first day on my new job — I am joining the developer team behind TomTom HOME. Nice at least one of my hobbies (Mozilla) has made it to a job. TomTom allowed me to stay in Cologne but I expect going to Amsterdam rather frequently.

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PC World chooses Adblock Plus as one of 100 best products of 2007 · 2007-05-23 19:08 by Wladimir Palant

It seems that Adblock Plus was chosen as one of 100 best products of 2007. This is pretty remarkable since the list consists not only from software solutions but has lots of hardware and services as well. From what I can see, Adblock Plus is the only Firefox extension chosen this year and the second altogether (first being Greasemonkey last year). Also, it seems that I was the only physical person who received the award this year, most others being larger companies like Google or Intel.

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Moving again · 2007-05-16 16:11 by Wladimir Palant

I am finished here in Oslo, so I will move to Cologne next week. In some way I feel sad about it, I really liked Oslo. On the other hand, I will finally be in the same country as everybody I care about, it has been too long. Anyway, goodbye Norway and welcome Germany!

On a related note, it seems that I won’t have internet access the next week. My internet provider wanted to get rid of me so much that it decided to disconnect me one week before the date I asked.

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The hazards of MIME sniffing · 2007-04-29 03:30 by Wladimir Palant

Webmasters probably know one particularly “helpful” feature of Internet Explorer — if you happen to misconfigure your web server and it sends HTML files designated as text files, Internet Explorer will silently correct this mistake and display the files anyway. Of course, if you wanted to display HTML as text (because you want to show the source code, or because it really is a text file with HTML snippets in it) it still will be displayed as HTML. And if you, as a user of a non-IE browser, ever came across a misconfigured server that displays HTML/images/Flash as plain text — now you know why nobody bothered fixing the mistake. This feature is called “MIME sniffing” and many articles have been written about it, so I don’t need to repeat them.

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Why you really should not hotlink · 2007-04-24 06:13 by Wladimir Palant

If you run a web site, you probably see this occasionally as well — people use your images, and instead of copying them over to their own servers they simply hotlink to your server. Now I don’t mind it when people use my images, nothing really worth protecting here. But I don’t like it when they start stealing my bandwidth and spamming my access logs.

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Firefox 2.0.0.4 closes ad blocking loopholes · 2007-04-19 00:57 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus has just got a little more useful. Yesterday two patches of mine landed on the Mozilla 1.8 branch which will be used for Firefox 2.0.0.4. What are they good for? They close loopholes that advertisers could use (and some already do use) to initiate requests to their servers without Adblock Plus interfering.

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