Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Upcoming and past changes to application compatibility · 2012-03-16 08:02 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with version 2.0 Adblock Plus requires at least Firefox 3.6.13 to be installed (or Thunderbird 3.1.7 or SeaMonkey 2.1). We really don’t support earlier Firefox 3.6 versions because of a critical bug that will cause Flash to break. Unfortunately, this limitation initially couldn’t be enforced by technical means (due to a limitation on addons.mozilla.org) so some people with old Firefox 3.6 versions nevertheless got it installed. If you are one of them: you should update your browser as soon as possible, already because of the numerous known security issues in the old versions.
Random thoughts on democracy and Russian presidential election · 2012-03-12 12:54 by Wladimir Palant
As some of you might know, Russia sort of elected a new old president a week ago. After taking a 4 years break as prime minister Putin now becomes Russian president for the third time. I’ve been following the Russian-language reactions to the election which I find quite interesting. While I like most readers of this blog have the luxury of living in a democracy, sometimes I need a reminder about what actually constitutes a democracy. Hint: elections in regular intervals are not sufficient.
On the pop-up blocker in Adblock Plus · 2012-02-15 18:33 by Wladimir Palant
There is a semi-hidden new feature in Adblock Plus 2.0: a pop-up blocker. I wanted to explain what this feature is about and why there are no big announcements about it.
We are back · 2012-02-09 16:04 by Wladimir Palant
As you probably noticed, the distribution update yesterday didn’t go as planned. For some reason, the new operating system confused the virtual server manager enough that it refused to start the server again. And since that issue couldn’t be resolved on our side fixing it took a while. Now the system has been restored from backup, I then applied my personal backup (because the hosting provider could only restore an old backup for reasons I’m unable to understand) and now we are only missing a few days worth of issue reports and probably a few forum posts from yesterday’s morning (roughly one hour between my backup and the start of the downtime).
Possible downtime on Wednesday · 2012-02-07 09:55 by Wladimir Palant
I will try to update the Linux distribution on adblockplus.org tomorrow (Wednesday), starting at around 8 AM CET. With some luck the server will only go down for a few seconds for a reboot. Obviously, there is some risk of an extended downtime but I hope that this time the backups will allow restoring service soon if something goes wrong. easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org (filter list downloads) will not be affected but everything else on the adblockplus.org domain (including EasyList homepage) will be.
The future of Element Hiding Helper · 2012-01-19 12:08 by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus roadmap currently has a bullet point “Integrate Element Hiding Helper into Adblock Plus”. After adding Page Inspector support to Element Hiding Helper today I think that I’m confident about what exactly will be integrated there.
Faster extension development cycle: install changes automatically · 2012-01-13 16:33 by Wladimir Palant
The usual extension development cycle is less than optimal: change something, create a new extension build, install it in the browser (gonna love warnings), restart the browser, finally test it. I don’t like repeating this cycle all the time and so in the past years I’ve been using a test environment in which most extension files are loaded directly from my source code checkout (thanks to a manipulated chrome.manifest file). With this test environment many changes could be tested by simply reopening the extension window, for others you would restart the browser.
Raymond Chen quote of the day · 2012-01-05 19:59 by Wladimir Palant
I regularly use a program that doesn’t follow this rule. The program allocates a lot of memory during the course of its life, and when I exit the program, it just sits there for several minutes, sometimes spinning at 100% CPU, sometimes churning the hard drive (sometimes both). When I break in with the debugger to see what’s going on, I discover that the program isn’t doing anything productive. It’s just methodically freeing every last byte of memory it had allocated during its lifetime.
Measuring the memory use of an SDK (Jetpack) based add-on · 2012-01-04 11:37 by Wladimir Palant
Add-on SDK 1.2.1 added a nifty feature: starting with Firefox 9 the memory usage of add-ons built with the SDK is visible in about:memory. However, if you actually try to use this feature you get lost in the sheer amount of compartments. Each module gets its own compartment and the SDK has lots and lots of them. This even prompted a user to report “zombie compartments” caused by my only SDK-based add-on so far.
Random thought on communities · 2011-12-15 23:46 by Wladimir Palant
Being in charge of a popular project has its highs and lows. On the one hand, creating something that is used by many people can be highly rewarding. You have a large community that supports you, there are many people willing to do their part. But then there are times when an unpopular change needs to be done, and as your community grows almost any change will make you unpopular with somebody. All the sudden you get people yelling at you — lots of people suddenly need to tell you how stupid that change is and what you should have done instead. It’s highly demotivating and makes you want to avoid uncomfortable changes. But that’s a dead end leading to a dead project.