Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Few words from the first employee · 2011-12-15 20:27 by Andrey Novikov
Thank you for the warm welcome. I am very glad to join the great team developing the world’s most popular plug-in. As Wladimir mentioned my first task is to refine user interface of Adblock Plus for Chrome.
Please welcome our first employee: Andrey Novikov · 2011-12-09 21:11 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I explained why we changed our policy on donations. This worked out and we were able to hire our first employee: Andrey Novikov. Andrey comes from a web development and server administration background, he is also the developer of the Androzic app for Android-based mobile phones. For now he is working on Adblock Plus for Chrome and already added proper recognition of third-party domains (something that only few people will notice but nevertheless important to bring our Chrome extension on par with the Firefox version). Next task on his list: porting user interface from Adblock Plus for Firefox to Chrome.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 4] · 2011-12-09 15:58 by Wladimir Palant
The previous part analyzed the last page of the survey where people replied on the role of Adblock Plus on the web. Of course, it would also be interesting to see whether the results are different depending on which group of survey respondents you look. I analyzed the last page for each of the survey languages separately and I’ve also created a separate analysis for “newbies” — people who said that they were using Firefox for less than one year. I’ll just publish the results here without commenting.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 3] · 2011-12-09 15:41 by Wladimir Palant
Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions, Adblock Plus functionality. Now we want to look at how people perceive the role of Adblock Plus on the web. This was the last page of the survey.
Google Chrome and pre-installed web apps · 2011-11-15 09:47 by Wladimir Palant
Google recently launched a redesigned version of its Web Store where one can install extensions and web apps. One particular feature caught my attention: it marks the extensions that you already have with a check mark. How does the web page know which extensions you have installed?
EU MozCamp, theme development, add-on localization with adofex · 2011-11-13 18:17 by Wladimir Palant
I’m still at the EU MozCamp 2011 but Mitchell Baker already gave her closing speech and things are wrapping up. It has been an interesting weekend, a bunch of add-on related sessions among other things. One interesting conclusion that I made from the discussion: the rapid releases aren’t a real issue for extension developers and don’t create more work. Ok, I’ve suspected that much already but it was nice to have other add-on authors confirm this. In the discussion session with extension developers this topic didn’t even come up, as opposed to localization for example which is a significant pain point. AMO’s automated compatibility checks for extensions are working nicely and mark most add-ons as compatible already during the Aurora phase. There are plans that go beyond that as well and it sounds like extension compatibility will mostly become a non-issue for end users in a few Firefox releases (at least as long as binary XPCOM components aren’t used).