Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Status update: 2010-10-30 · 2010-10-31 10:04 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Major update to Element Hiding Helper code and architecture
- Added Shift+Mousewheel handling to Element Hiding Helper, also lock/unlock command
- Finalized Element Hiding Helper strings, translations started
- A little eye candy for Element Hiding Helper — better styling for hotkey labels
- Release candidates for Adblock Plus 1.3, Element Hiding Helper 1.1 and Diagnostics 1.1.3 are done (the latter has no real changes, turned out none were necessary)
- Russian translation for Adblock Plus, Russian and German translations for Element Hiding Helper (with some help from forum.mozilla-russia.org users)
- Coordinated translations on Babelzilla, made sure the released locales are free of errors (way too many translations still unfinished however)
- Dropped Indonesian, Malay and Brasilian Portuguese locales from this Adblock Plus release, these weren’t even updated for Adblock Plus 1.2
Dropping support for Firefox 3.0 · 2010-10-25 14:37 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus 1.3 will be using a simpler and faster module to manage preferences. This module isn’t in Adblock Plus development builds yet but it is already used in the latest Element Hiding Helper build. As it turned out, this module isn’t working properly in Firefox 3.0 due to some JavaScript engine bug. It’s not clear which bug it is and whether it has a simple work-around. Frankly, I am not very inclined to spend time researching historical bugs in Bugzilla. Instead, Adblock Plus 1.3 and Element Hiding Helper 1.1 will no longer support Firefox 3.0. Anybody still using Firefox 3.0 should be reminded that Mozilla ended support for Firefox 3.0 in March 2010, and by now it has a large number of known and unpatched security issues — using it to browse the web is not safe. I highly recommend updating to the latest Firefox release (currently Firefox 3.6).
Status update: 2010-10-22 · 2010-10-23 12:56 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Issue reporter client-side implementation
- Started beta phase for Adblock Plus
- Finalized Adblock Plus strings, translators started working
- Added third/first party indicator to document source column in blockable items
- Changed build system to centralize extension metadata in one file (particularly to allow generating homepage links for available languages automatically)
- Updated German translation (thanks to MonztA for proofreading)
- Rearchitectured Element Hiding Helper, made it more like Adblock Plus
- Changed configuration of Element Hiding Helper hotkeys to allow specifying multiple hotkeys (Ctrl-Shift-S is now used if Ctrl-Shift-K is taken)
- A few minor changes to Element Hiding Helper filter composer
Status Update: 2010-10-15 · 2010-10-18 13:06 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- First draft of a privacy policy page is under discussion
- Some issue reporter polishing (particularly handling of transmission errors)
- Tons of Firefox 4 work after JavaScript compartments landing — filed bugs on three issues, fixed an issue in Adblock Plus, worked around another issue affecting Element Hiding Helper
- New icon to indicate slow filters (a developer doing graphical design — it’s an admirable attempt, you must give me that at least)
In progress
- Handling of special cases in issue reporter (e.g. users without filter subscriptions)
Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper issues in current Firefox nightlies · 2010-10-18 12:01 by Wladimir Palant
A few days ago an important and much anticipated change landed for the Firefox nightlies: JavaScript compartments. In theory, this should improve performance and security without having any side-effects whatsoever. This is a very radical change to the JavaScript engine architecture however and it caused a number of regressions of course. Some of them affect Adblock Plus and Element Hiding Helper extensions, I better list them before more bug reports are filed against Adblock Plus. Right now you can only hit these issues if you are using the latest Firefox nightly builds, not Firefox 4 Beta 6 however. I hope that the most critical issues will be resolved before Firefox 4 Beta 7.
New EasyList website live · 2010-10-11 09:11 by Wladimir Palant
Some might have noticed that the EasyList website hasn’t changed much in the past three years, it really needed to get a face lift. Michael has been working on a new website version for the past three months and now it is finally live. This should make finding EasyList-related information significantly easier. Also, the new website is available in two languages (English and German) with a third language (French) being planned.
Status Update: 2010-10-08 · 2010-10-08 23:08 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- New About Adblock Plus page is live and ready for translating
- First drafts of the new homepage and system requirements page are under discussion
- Improved filter matching performance by 20-35%
- Went through submitted issue reports to identify missing data, added pop-up opener and an optional contact email address
- Investigated options to embed JavaScript into Python – very sad story
Status Update: 2010-10-01 · 2010-10-02 00:54 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Landed issue reporter, fixed tons of small problems there, improved code quality, added more data and a list of recently submitted reports — looks solid now.
- Changed suggestions in the filter composer — protocol is no longer part of the suggestion.
- Added a warning to the filter composer, displayed if the custom pattern no longer matches the address it was supposed to block.
- Implemented and evaluated a faster filter matching algorithm proposed by lyricconch. Added to the Adblock Plus 1.4 roadmap.
- Updated the roadmap, especially defined the major items for Adblock Plus 1.4.
Status Update: 2010-09-24 · 2010-09-24 18:30 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Scripts to receive and display issue reports on the server side
- Made sure links to documentation in Adblock Plus no longer need to be translated — the extension now uses a new entry point on adblockplus.org, the user is redirected to the correct language version if it exists.
- Updated to Anwiki 0.2.3, will try to stay on stable releases from now on
- Rewrote subscription handling scripts to use Python instead of Perl
In progress
- Sending in reports about filter issues — will be in the next development build but more work is necessary.
Status Update: 2010-09-17 · 2010-09-17 19:07 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Removed leftovers of the old website, unified navigation menu in different parts of the website.
- Finally updated Textpattern now that the only thing depending on it is this blog.
- Improved Anwiki sync so that www repository contains individual changes along with all the necessary information now.
- Significantly improved startup performance of Adblock Plus (found a way to speed up Gecko’s processing of the element hiding stylesheet).
- Changed externally added subscriptions so that they no longer persist, updated public interface documentation.
In progress
- Sending in reports about filter issues — made some progress on the client side, the usual scenario is almost done (screenshots).