Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Heise-RSS in Thunderbird vernünftig lesen · 2006-09-24 06:03 by Wladimir Palant
Ich bin sicher, dass ich nicht der einzige bin, der sich über den RSS-Feed von Heise geärgert hat. Was soll man damit, wenn da keine Zusammenfassung drin steht? Versuchen, den Inhalt an der Überschrift zu erraten? Selbst das Datum der Meldung gibt es in dem Feed erst seit kurzem.
Thunderbird, first impressions · 2006-09-23 04:55 by Wladimir Palant
I have been experimenting with Adblock Plus in Thunderbird (large parts of the user interface work already, I’ll release a development build soon). It looks like I might stop using “Simplified HTML” + “Block loading of remote images”, a setup I have been using for over three years. But maybe now I can finally enjoy reading RSS feeds with images.
Google does it again · 2006-09-22 01:13 by Wladimir Palant
When I first saw this, I could only think — wow! Word processing and spreadsheets are classical examples of areas where web applications will never be able to achieve the quality of desktop applications. But Google made a habit out of overthrowing accepted wisdoms and so they’ve gone great lengths to make their spreadsheets web app feel like a desktop application — with success, for most part.
Adblock - the evolution · 2006-09-10 00:31 by Wladimir Palant
Did you know when the Adblock project came to be? Have you ever wondered whether there ever was Adblock 0.1? Maybe also asking yourself what it looked like? Now you can get the answers to all these questions, and since one picture says more than a thousand words — you also get screenshots. Thanks to CVS’ long memory these screenshots are still there for us — take a look!
Немного о книгах · 2006-09-04 00:30 by Wladimir Palant
Все-таки не выдержал и прочитал сразу почти все книги, которые привез от родителей из Германии — старенького Брэдбери (чисто из спортивного интереса, ничего из себя не представляет), две Нины Васины (захватывающе и весьма оригинально, не ожидал) и “Чапаев и Пустота” Пелевина (Пелевин в своем репертуаре, очень неплохо).
Extension idea: Share Your Adblock List · 2006-09-03 01:59 by Wladimir Palant
I discussed automated publishing of filter lists with Malte Kraus (aka Dr. Evil) a while ago and I got an idea for an extension that might be useful. It should extend Adblock Plus (and maybe Adblock as well) to allow publishing your list of filters with two clicks. Unfortunately I won’t have time to implement it (the extension itself is pretty trivial but the server side will take some time).
Deutsche Übersetzung von adblockplus.org endlich (fast) komplett · 2006-09-01 17:28 by Wladimir Palant
For those not speaking German: this is the announcement that the German translation of adblockplus.org is finally complete.
Eine gute Nachricht für alle deutschsprachigen Besucher von adblockplus.org: die deutsche Version der Seite ist endlich komplett. Ausnahmen sind lediglich die Dokumentation der nsIAdblockPlus-Schnittstelle, die nicht übersetzt werden sollte, und Änderungslisten für ältere Versionen — diese sollten auch irgendwann übersetzt werden.
Adblock Plus 0.7.2 is going to be great! · 2006-08-23 19:59 by Wladimir Palant
For some reason the last two days have been very productive — I found solutions for three basic problems that have been bugging me for quite a while.
But first of all I have to admit my stupidity. I added “immediate unblocking” to “long term plans” because I thought that it would require changes in Gecko. Then I found out that Gecko already had something like what I was thinking about, yet getting it to work correctly would take some time (that’s when I added this feature to the plans for the next release, with a question mark). And only now I finally saw the obvious solution — in order to make something run through the content policies again you have to remove it from the document and then re-add.
And we proudly present: The Deregifier! · 2006-08-23 00:26 by Wladimir Palant
After years of regexp mania we now have to go back to simple filters — starting with Adblock Plus 0.7 those are more efficient than regular expressions. This doesn’t mean that regular expressions got any slower, it’s that simple filters got very fast. There are also other advantages a dozen simple filters have over one long regexp. They are simply easier to read, “effective filter” in the blockable items tooltips presents more relevant information (one rule instead of the whole regexp), we get hit counts for every filter that is also more relevant, and we can deativate every simple filter separately if it causes problems.
Investigating filter matching algorithms · 2006-08-22 20:02 by Wladimir Palant
Warning: dense computer science talk ahead. Proceed at your own risk!
This is the story behind improving the performance of Adblock’s most important component — filter matching. The problem is the following: we have a set F consisting of f filters, we have a string (an address) S of length n, and we need to know whether this string matches any of the filters. If it does, we need to block the element associated with this address. And we should decide really soon because there are a few hundred more of those addresses to be tested and the user is waiting impatiently.