Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Update on AMO's performance tests · 2011-05-18 18:02 by Wladimir Palant
I forgot to update my overview of AMO’s performance measurements for their latest test run on May 14th, done it now. As Alice Nodelman notes, a bunch of bugs has been fixed on the technical side. Six weeks after the campaign announcement it finally looks like the most critical bugs are fixed and the numbers are mostly reliable.
Running Linux in the browser · 2011-05-17 18:50 by Wladimir Palant
I haven’t seen it mentioned on Planet yet, could it be that nobody heard? I’ve seen lots of cool browser demos lately but this one really blows me away: jslinux by Fabrice Bellard. This is a real x86 emulator written in JavaScript and running Linux, not a fake Linux terminal. The emulated hardware is somewhat limited (e.g. no FPU) but this doesn’t make packing an emulator into less than 20 kB of JavaScript code less impressive. The emulator loads a bunch of binary Linux images and — voilà, Linux boots up.
Signing Firefox extensions with Python and M2Crypto · 2011-05-15 00:07 by Wladimir Palant
Sadly, signing Firefox extensions isn’t easy. I’ve seen people give up not having mastered even the very first step (install NSS). And after that you have to use its cryptic command line tools to set up a database, import your certificate into it as well as any intermediate or root certificates required, and then actually use signtool to sign your files. Java’s signtool is easier to handle but incompatible (though, I think the only real difference is that it doesn’t put zigbert.rsa first in the archive). So while rewriting my build scripts in Python I took it as a chance and implemented signing in Python using M2Crypto module. One of the advantages for me was that my build script can now package up the extension entirely in memory, without having to write out intermediate results for signing.
Donations policy change · 2011-05-04 18:01 by Wladimir Palant
It has been eight months since Adblock Plus changed from a hobby project to a full-time employment for me. The other person employed in the project is Till who you might know from the forums and who is responsible for our business development. Unfortunately, despite the help I am getting from Till and the numerous volunteers there is a noticeable resources shortage in the project that is slowing down Adblock Plus development.
New round of AMO's performance tests (2011-04-16) · 2011-04-17 17:42 by Wladimir Palant
I uploaded the overview for the new round of AMO‘s performance tests. The bug that skewed most Windows results so far has been fixed, so the results are more usable now.
Do JavaScript proxies allow undetectable function wrappers? · 2011-04-15 18:13 by Wladimir Palant
I am looking into whether an extension can use JavaScript proxies to do something similar to the built-in pop-up blocker since the built-in pop-up blocker uses a fixed logic that cannot be extended. The goal is to wrap window.open method to verify that any calls are “legit”. Unfortunately, no matter what I try the webpage is able to detect that it is dealing with a proxy and not the real function.
The wrong way of allowing users to make informed decisions · 2011-04-13 15:15 by Wladimir Palant
One point I probably didn’t stress often enough in my previous blog posts on AMO‘s add-on performance measurements is how poorly percentages reflect the real effect of add-ons. At least I see no indication that the people responsible for this campaign intend to change their mind and provide users with more accurate information. Please allow me to explain once again why these numbers are misleading (bug 648742 reworded).
Overview for Mozilla's add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-11 16:55 by Wladimir Palant
I got tired of digging through logs so I created an overview page for AMO’s add-on performance testing results. This shows both the absolute slowdown values as well as percentages for each operating system, along with a link to the corresponding logs. It also shows the standard deviation for each test and flags results that are affected by issues known so far.
Overview of my bug reports on add-on performance measurements · 2011-04-09 19:52 by Wladimir Palant
In a comment to my previous blog post Jorge Villalobos asked me to file bugs on everything I think is wrong with the add-on performance measurements. So that’s what I did. The resulting list is long and I didn’t feel like creating a tracking bug so I better list the bugs in a blog post so that everybody (especially me) can find them.
On fluctuations in performance testing results · 2011-04-08 10:25 by Wladimir Palant
Yesterday I concluded that (with all bugs fixed) the results of Mozilla’s add-on performance measurements shouldn’t fluctuate by more than 2% of the Firefox startup time. Sorry, I was wrong. Later that day I noticed Read It Later, currently #43 on that list, supposedly causing 4% slower Firefox startup times. Yet this extension was definitely disabled during performance testing due to bug 648229. Does this now mean that each disabled add-on causes a 4% performance impact? Definitely not, disabled add-ons have no measurable effect on performance. So digging up the raw numbers for that add-on was definitely a good idea.