Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Why you do not want to use the LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag · 2011-01-30 15:49 by Wladimir Palant

When you are creating a Firefox extension you don’t need to use browser’s default settings when downloading something, you can choose from a number of load flags defined on the nsIRequest interface instead. Some of them are really useful, e.g. the flags controlling caching. And then there is LOAD_ANONYMOUS flag that sounds like a good idea for downloads of public files — after all, why should you allow cookies and such? Making user tracking possible isn’t the point here.

List of Adblock Plus/Chrome issues · 2011-01-25 11:32 by Wladimir Palant

I just created a known issues page for Adblock Plus/Chrome. So far I can think of three main issues that are being raised regularly and that we cannot do much about right now. Does anybody have more?

adblockplus.org back after a lengthy downtime [updated] · 2011-01-23 05:30 by Wladimir Palant

I just brought adblockplus.org back from the longest downtime in four years (around 30 hours). What happened is that I broke the server when trying to update the Linux distribution used. Now updating the distribution on a live server is a risky affair but the hosting provider has several protection layers in place so that I didn’t expect more than one hour downtime if things go badly.

Changes to development builds · 2011-01-08 13:03 by Wladimir Palant

Now that we need to produce development builds for Chrome the old Perl script generating development builds was getting somewhat too inflexible. It has been rewritten in Python and now I finished hooking up the new script. While it is still not generating Chrome builds (something to add early next week), there are already some changes for Firefox builds.

Status update: 2011-01-07 · 2011-01-07 19:15 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4.5 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Investigated issues with Flash objects staying hidden in Chrome, filed Chrome issue 68518, also implemented a work-around
Investigated some element hiding rules breaking Gmail in Chrome, filed Chrome issue 68705
Released Adblock Plus for Chrome 1.0.25
Investigated issues disabling filters from list of blockable items in Firefox 3.6 — caused by wrongly applied JavaScript wrappers, solution still outstanding
Investigated memory leak visible in my main profile again — with limited success
Finished up new script to create development builds — tested and checked into sitescripts repository, needs to be hooked up now

How does one approach an "unusual" memory leak? · 2011-01-06 18:05 by Wladimir Palant

Firefox memory usage used to be very stable for me, it reached 200 MB and stayed there. However, some time ago this changed and now I see memory usage close to 1 GB after using Firefox for a few days. This only seems to affect my main Firefox profile which doesn’t see too many changes. So I can name the primary suspects: a minor Firefox release or Adblock Plus 1.3. And I clearly don’t like seeing my extension on the suspects list, so I did everything I could to ensure that it isn’t leaking memory. However, neither Leak Monitor, nor leak gauge, nor direct code inspection did bring up anything suspicious.

Status update: 2010-12-23 · 2010-12-24 20:25 by Wladimir Palant

Worked 4 days on Adblock Plus this week.

Done

Released Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.0.22, 1.0.23, 1.0.24
Investigated numerous issues reported after release, we should have an overview of what needs fixing now
Added support for X-Do-Not-Track header in Adblock Plus nightlies
Released Adblock Plus 1.3.3

Status update: 2010-12-19 · 2010-12-19 21:57 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Finished security review of Anwiki, all XSS holes should be plugged now
Set up rsync to be used for distributing EasyList instead of CVS
A few more minor fixes for Adblock Plus/Chrome, updated subscriptions metadata
Released two Adblock Plus/Chrome development builds (manually for now)
Created forum area for Google Chrome users, updated link in the extension
Investigated a bunch of Java-related issues, filed Mozilla bug 619349 and Mozilla bug 619399.
Investigated WebKit bug 45586 which is hurting Adblock Plus/Chrome a lot.
Reverted making subscription downloads “anonymous” (a change that went into Adblock Plus 1.3.2), turns out this breaks password-protected downloads as well as downloads through some proxy servers.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome to be released soon · 2010-12-15 18:52 by Wladimir Palant

For a while my official position on Adblock Plus for non-Gecko browsers read like this:

Forget it, I am not writing Adblock Plus from scratch just to support your favorite browser (be it Chrome or Safari or Opera or Internet Explorer). And even if somebody gives me the code — I am not going to maintain two unrelated projects. This asks for an independent project and in fact, there are already independent projects to implement ad blocking for all of these browsers.

As you can read from this, the frequent requests to port Adblock Plus to <insert your favorite browser here> got quite annoying. Still, it is time to change this position, we are starting to look into ways to cover other browsers than Firefox and SeaMonkey. And we are starting with Google Chrome, a beta version of Adblock Plus for Google Chrome is scheduled to be released soon. I’ll try to give answers to some questions that you are certainly urging to ask.

Status update: 2010-12-10 · 2010-12-15 18:51 by Wladimir Palant

Done

Using JSHydra for automated code rewriting, seems to work correctly on all Adblock Plus modules now and can be used to generate Chrome-compatible code
Updated Adblock Plus for Chrome code — now using current Adblock Plus code instead of a one year old snapshot
Fixed a bunch of minor issues in Adblock Plus for Chrome (most importantly: made it work with XHTML documents)
Switched to newer Drag&Drop API in Preferences dialog (yes, Gecko 1.9.0 no longer needs to be supported)
Released Adblock Plus 1.3.2