Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Redesigning Adblock Plus preferences dialog · 2010-09-13 17:37 by Wladimir Palant
Some of you probably don’t know, Future development is the part of the Adblock Plus forum where change proposals to Adblock Plus, this website and other extensions like Element Hiding Helper are discussed. You cannot create new topics there but interesting proposals from other forum parts will be moved. I am writing all this because I created a new topic there a few minutes ago: Redesigning preferences dialog. The lengthy post lists six change proposals which will hopefully make your life better. If you are interested feel free to comment in the forum (no registration required but you might want to register to get reply notifications). Please have understanding that off-topic discussions in this forum part will be removed.
Status Update: 2010-09-10 · 2010-09-10 18:05 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Filed more Anwiki bugs and fixed some of them, adjusted more things around the new website. It seems to be stable now so that I switched it live (caching and sharing accounts with the forum work fine).
- Got confirmation from Mozilla that bug 564667 will not be fixed for Firefox 4. Managed find a work-around nevertheless and created an impressive pile of hacks. Decided not to stop pursuing this in the end and dropped installation without browser restart from the roadmap.
New adblockplus.org website is live now · 2010-09-10 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
The new Anwiki-based adblockplus.org website is live now. As I said before, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes yet, it is mostly about switching to a more flexible technology. To log in you use the same user name and password as for the forum — however, users with less than 5 forum posts will need to be cleared by me first (sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t want to have spammers edit texts on this website). Some things still need to be polished but so far the new website appears to be running well.
How many hacks does it take to make your extension install without a restart? · 2010-09-10 15:50 by Wladimir Palant
Dave Townsend did some really great work on the add-on manager recently, he managed to completely rewrite the old crappy backend code and replace it with something far more sane. Along the way a new feature was added: starting with Firefox 4 some add-ons should be able to opt-in and install/uninstall without requiring a browser restart. This feature was primarily meant for JetPack-built extensions but is generally open to all other extensions as well. I tried enabling this feature for Adblock Plus and found that there is an awful number of catches attached to it.
Status Update: 2010-09-03 · 2010-09-04 02:56 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Finished migrating all website content into Anwiki and made sure it is fully functional.
Yes, pretty much nothing else this week. That’s nine new Anwiki bugs filed, a few dozen webpages edited to remove differences between languages (had to write my own comparison script since “content desynchronization” message from Anwiki wasn’t much help), two new content classes and a bunch more code changes to make sure everything works as expected.
New website version ready for testing · 2010-09-04 02:34 by Wladimir Palant
As many people probably noticed, the Adblock Plus website is urgently in need of some updates and rewriting. Unfortunately, making changes is too hard because the three language versions of the website need to be kept in sync. Some time ago we found Anwiki which (unlike Textpattern that is currently used) is specifically designed to handle content in multiple languages. You make the changes in one language and they automatically pop up in the other languages, marked as untranslated. And creating new translations of existing pages is trivial. And links to untranslated pages will be automatically redirected to English. Just perfect.
Status Update: 2010-08-27 · 2010-08-30 10:06 by Wladimir Palant
Done
- Finished redesigning the way Adblock Plus stores its data, now following the minimalistic approach to get the best performance and minimal memory use. The usability of blockable items list suffered somewhat but seems to be acceptable so far.
- Improved subscription downloads, especially to ensure better distribution over the week. Also some detail improvements and better/more unit tests.
- One more trivial Firefox 4 fix due to changes in bug 383930. The issue is a minor annoyance when dealing with submenus of the context menu.
- Set up a blog for EasyList, Zine turned out to be the best option after all, despite its development being seemingly stale. This blog will eventually be migrated to Zine as well, shouldn’t be too complicated.
Important changes coming to the Adblock Plus project · 2010-08-22 18:42 by Wladimir Palant
As I indicated before, there is much work to be done in the Adblock Plus project to keep it relevant. How are we coming along? Well, very slowly. The main problem remains my availability, too many of the tasks still hang on me. I tried delegating work, quite successfully in some areas, but that’s not enough — and moving some other areas out of my hands (like website localization or bug reports handling) requires some work on my part first. We are currently getting into the “interesting” phase with the Adblock Plus project where we actually get a chance to influence something and I think that moving faster is essential now.
Status Update: 2010-08-20 · 2010-08-20 18:56 by Wladimir Palant
I’ll try to publish these status updates at the end of each week — this is mainly a way for me to organize my work but it might also prove useful to somebody who wants to track Adblock Plus work. If you are annoyed by them — these will always appear in the “progress” category, many RSS feed readers allow filtering by post category. I’ll also explicitly not post these in the “adblock plus” category.
Done
- Fixed regressions introduced by Firefox 4 development
- Released Adblock Plus 1.2.2 from 1.2.x branch to allow using stable release with Firefox 4 betas/nightlies
- Mediated morphing of RuAdList into an EasyList supplement
Why app-global extensions are essentially broken · 2010-08-18 12:44 by Wladimir Palant
Should I rather title this blog post “App-global extensions considered harmful”? I hope not because I see some valid use cases for installing an extension in a central location where it will be taken over regardless of the profile used. However, the current implementation in XULRunner/Firefox has some very nasty side-effects which make using this mechanism a bad choice. And there are apparently many people making the same experience.