Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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).
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.