Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Forward compatibility of filters [Done] · 2013-02-04 09:31 by Wladimir Palant
Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.
Current state
A small number of our users stays on outdated Adblock Plus versions forever, e.g. 0.5% are still on Adblock Plus 0.7.* (mostly 0.7.5.5). There are similar numbers for Adblock Plus 1.3.10 which is the last version that can be installed on PowerPC Macs by regular means. Outdated versions create issues for filter list authors who don’t want to cause breakage for these users and have to use backwards-compatible filters like foo$popup,image,~image instead of just foo$popup. This is largely because Adblock Pus simply ignores unknown filter options.
Simplifying subscription downloads module [Done] · 2013-02-04 08:18 by Wladimir Palant
Done, this proposal has been implemented as of 2013-07-08.
The module responsible for updating subscriptions is one of the most complicated components of Adblock Plus, also one that is notoriously complicated to test properly. Much of the code here is outdated for one reason or another.
Improving subscriptions download infrastructure · 2013-01-17 14:18 by Wladimir Palant
As some people probably noticed, our roadmap page hasn’t been updated in a while. I originally used it to communicate what I am working on and what my priorities currently are — but one centralized roadmap simply doesn’t work any more with multiple people on the team working on various aspects of the project in parallel. So I want to try a different approach — have roadmaps for major changes that we are working on posted to the blog. You can see all of them by looking at the corresponding blog category and there is also a separate RSS feed for them. We will try to update the roadmaps to make sure it’s obvious what has been done already.
The batch of tasks here is about the subscriptions download infrastructure, the servers that EasyList and some other filter subscriptions are downloaded from.
New adblockplus.org · 2013-01-10 16:31 by Felix Dahlke
As of now, the new adblockplus.org is finally online. These were some of our goals for the new website:
- More appealing, yet simple design
- Better navigation
- A decent mobile version
- Should work in any popular browser, including Internet Explorer 6
- Should work with JavaScript disabled
- A single landing page, not one for each platform
I believe we’ve managed all that, what do you think?
Read on if you’re interested in the technical side.
Sorry about the server outage · 2012-11-23 14:20 by Wladimir Palant
Following the Adblock Plus 2.2 release yesterday our server became pretty much unreachable. This was the result of the new typo correction feature downloading its database. Unfortunately, while I was very focused on ensuring that this feature has the necessary quality I entirely forgot what this one server request per user would mean for our old server which cannot really handle much load. A new server with much more resources is handling this now but that change still took a day to propagate. Sorry about that, again a lesson learned.
Typo correction feature in Adblock Plus · 2012-11-21 16:40 by Wladimir Palant
Lots of Adblock Plus users were complaining about unintentionally landing on web pages that tried to use their mistake by either showing ads to them or even by installing malware. We heard you and thought up a way to fix that. A few months ago we took over the development of the URL Fixer extension and made some substantial improvements. Now this functionality is ready for prime time and has been added to Adblock Plus 2.2.
Translating Adblock Plus: Dumping Babelzilla for Crowdin · 2012-11-09 13:40 by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus project has been using Babelzilla for translations for more than six years. Yet, time has come to change that. Two days ago I moved the translations for all my extensions from Babelzilla to Crowdin, meaning Adblock Plus, Element Hiding Helper and JavaScript Deobfuscator. This was preceded by a lengthy pilot phase with the Customizations for Adblock Plus extension and recently also Adblock Plus for Chrome.
Removing Do-Not-Track support from Adblock Plus · 2012-10-27 01:10 by Wladimir Palant
I still believe that the Do-Not-Track proposal is the most promising idea to let users opt out of tracking, it offers some value even to the people using Adblock Plus with the EasyPrivacy filter list. The proposal gained a lot of traction already and will continue to gain speed. Adblock Plus was one of the first implementors, and yet I decided that this feature is no longer worth keeping.
Modularization in a restartless extension · 2012-07-12 17:21 by Wladimir Palant
A simple restartless extension can probably keep all its code in the bootstrap.js file. However, it gets crowded there very soon. Plus there is some code that is really only boilerplate and should probably kept separate from your actual code.
This sounds like a job for JavaScript code modules. It is mostly a matter of taste (I prefer CommonJS module syntax) but there is one really big disadvantage of JavaScript code modules: they have to be unloaded explicitly when your extension is shut down. Which means that you either have to keep a list of modules to unload in your bootstrap.js file or add cleanup code each time you load a module. I find neither approach very compelling.
Why you should make your next add-on restartless · 2012-07-12 14:18 by Wladimir Palant
Note: This article is not about extensions based on the Add-on SDK (Jetpack). You don’t have to use the SDK to create a restartless extension. Just wanted to point this out explicitly to avoid confusion.
An extension that will install without requiring a Firefox restart? This was a nightmare to develop not too long ago. Fortunately, things changed and the last showstopper bug was fixed in Firefox 8. Effort to create a restartless (or bootstrapped as it is called officially) extension is acceptable now. In fact, I have converted all my extensions and removed support for classic non-restartless extensions from my build tools — I am certain that I am not going back.