Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 2] · 2011-11-07 15:03 by Wladimir Palant
Previous parts were: survey set-up, general questions. Now we want to look at questions about Adblock Plus functionality.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 1] · 2011-11-07 12:18 by Wladimir Palant
The previous blog post explains how we implemented the survey, now it is time to start analyzing the results (sorry about keeping you waiting). Here we want to look at the results of the first page where we asked general questions, mainly to get an idea of who is responding and to allow segmentation of the results. By now we have 1552 completed submissions. The number of answers is slightly different for each question however — all answers were optional and we had to throw out some answers because they were clearly invalid.
Adblock Plus user survey results [Part 0] · 2011-10-10 10:43 by Wladimir Palant
Please note that this will be the only post to be syndicated to Planet Mozilla, the other parts of this series will appear in my blog only — I can imagine that most readers of Planet have very little interest in what I am writing here. If you are interested in the full analysis of the results, please visit my blog in a few days.
At the moment we have 1360 responses to the user survey which is more than enough to start analyzing the results. There will be some more responses before the survey ends but we don’t expect to get much more than 1500 responses and the overall results shouldn’t change significantly.
Introducing Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus · 2011-09-30 12:04 by Wladimir Palant
A few weeks ago we (meaning Till Faida and me) founded a new company called Eyeo GmbH (pronounced aɪ-o). Yesterday I got the official confirmation that all the formalities are done. This company will help us fund continued development of Adblock Plus now. My official title is “Managing director” now but don’t worry: I will continue doing what I’ve always done — lead Adblock Plus development and make sure that we have a great product to present. And Till will make sure that the business part works and we get money to put into the development (ok, that’s pretty much what he has been doing all along). And our community will hopefully continue being the great help it always was.
Aktuelle Informationen der ukrainischen Botschaft? So findet man sie! · 2011-09-24 14:55 by Wladimir Palant
This is once again an off-topic blog post about the information policy of the Ukrainian embassy in Germany. Main point is making this information easier to find for Ukrainian citizens who live in Germany which is why it is being published in German and Russian.
Das ist jetzt mal ein Blog-Post, das rein gar nichts mit Adblock Plus zu tun hat. Sinn und Zweck ist lediglich, diese Informationen besser auffindbar zu machen.
Эта статья, в виде исключения, абсолютно не связана с Adblock Plus. Основной смысл ее публикации в том, чтобы эту информацию было немного проще найти.
Google Chrome image loading bug finally fixed · 2011-09-16 09:52 by Wladimir Palant
One of the most persistent issues that Adblock Plus is facing in Google Chrome is WebKit bug 45586. It breaks tons of websites, mostly the ones providing image zoom functionality. In short, if Adblock Plus is active this bug prevents the websites from getting the correct image size. And there is absolutely no viable work-around.
On rapid releases and version numbers · 2011-08-19 18:45 by Wladimir Palant
I’ve spent a little too much time arguing about rapid releases and version numbers in a German-language forum. In the end, I think that the benefits of rapid releases outweigh their disadvantages. It is indeed important for Mozilla to bring out new features faster, working more than a year on a release like it happened for Firefox 4 is unacceptable. Seeing Mozilla fall behind on caniuse.com and the like isn’t great, Mozilla shouldn’t become the factor slowing down progress on the web. Also, as an add-on author I like that release dates are predictable now, it allows planning in advance.
Details on the resolved Adblock Plus for Chrome security issue · 2011-08-17 12:55 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.1.4 for Google Chrome has been released today and fixes a minor security issue. This blog post provides some details.
Binary XPCOM components are dead - js-ctypes is the way to go · 2011-07-12 13:19 by Wladimir Palant
Daniel Glazman is shocked to see how hard shipping binary XPCOM components with an extension became now. Fact is, we simply didn’t notice the hidden message of blog posts announcing dropping binary compatibility (meaning that your component needs to be recompiled for each new Firefox version, no matter how simple it is) and rapid releases — binary XPCOM components in extensions are deprecated. Theoretically, somebody could still continue using them but it requires so much effort that nobody can be expected to do that. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it said like that anywhere, hence this blog post. There is still tons of documentation on binary XPCOM components on MDN and no deprecation warnings. Even XPCOM changes in Gecko 2.0 page lists all the important changes without making any conclusions.
Are undetectable changes to a native prototype possible? · 2011-07-11 14:27 by Wladimir Palant
This is a follow-up to Do JavaScript proxies allow undetectable function wrappers?. After that blog post I managed to solve the main problem: with Function.toString() and Function.toSource() being the only information leaks (bug 650299) one only needs to wrap these functions as well to get undetectable function proxies. However, the remaining problem is manipulating Window.prototype.open so that it actually returns my wrapper and the webpage can neither detect nor revert this manipulation.