Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Ah, that wonderful Flash installation experience... · 2010-04-22 10:57 by Wladimir Palant

Apparently, I am not the only one who noticed that the Flash installation experience has turned from bad to worse. Paul O’Shannessy uses pretty strong language to describe the procedure but I think it is justified. Until recently you could ignore all the bells and whistles and still download the executable which would then install Flash (and only Flash, regardless of the pre-checked crap that you might have forgotten to uncheck). Now you have to install the Adobe DLM extension (never mind that plug-in installation doesn’t usually require a browser restart) and there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid it. Still wonder why so many people want to see Flash obsoleted by HTML5?

NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED status in nsIHttpChannel · 2010-03-19 09:17 by Wladimir Palant

Dear Lazyweb! Do you have any idea why XMLHttpRequest might fail with channel.status being NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED? This seems to be happening consistently for some Adblock Plus users when downloading https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt. This issue is happening on all platforms and across all supported Firefox versions (I see 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 in the logs).

The unnecesary Ars Technica rant · 2010-03-16 16:25 by Wladimir Palant

Please forgive me this (hopefully unusual) rant. It is simply that I am so disappointed. Over the years I learned that quality journalism is extremely rare. I also came to expect very little from the media (both online and offline) — most often, journalists fail at what I consider the very basics of their job, namely understanding what they are writing about and verifying the information (I very much appreciate the exceptions to that rule but they are just that — exceptions). No problem, if it is important I can usually find the original source and get myself an overview. As it is, getting me disappointed is hard. But apparently not impossible.

Help needed: guide for new subscription authors · 2010-03-12 16:10 by Wladimir Palant

I had to guide a few people through the process of setting up a new filter list recently, this reminded me that documentation for new subscription authors is long overdue. Unfortunately, explaining everything necessary isn’t exactly simple and I don’t have the time to write this document. Which is why I want to ask for your help. I created a Google document where I listed the points that I feel should be mentioned. Maybe there are some more points that I forgot but either way: they need to be fleshed out.

The devastating effects of ad blocking · 2010-03-08 15:08 by Wladimir Palant

A few years ago I used to blog about some of the more ridiculous claims that ad blocking opponents make and take them apart. Fortunately, I no longer have to. Other people do this now and they are much more successful expressing their opinions. So I don’t really need to write about the recent article at Ars Technica on the effects of ad blocking. I do so mostly to link to the responses so that I can find them again.

Content Security Policy enabled on adblockplus.org · 2010-03-05 13:09 by Wladimir Palant

If you are using Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 (Mozilla Developer Preview) or even Firefox nightly builds then your browser already supports Content Security Policy. This is a mechanism to prevent attacks on a website like Cross-Site Scripting or Clickjacking. While I believe that adblockplus.org isn’t vulnerable to any of these attacks, I certainly like having an additional layer of protection and switched on Content Security Policy on this site. A possible side-effect is that some things which used to work fine might fail to load now — if you see something like that please let me know.

Linux New Media Award for Adblock Plus · 2010-03-04 23:49 by Wladimir Palant

I was at CeBIT today, collecting the Linux Media Award for the best open source Firefox extension. I just want to repeat what I said there: I really didn’t expect to come that far. After all, initially I only intended to quickly improve Adblock and find somebody to maintain the new codebase. And now, four years later, I am still continuing to improve Adblock Plus and there is much more work to be done. This is largely the “fault” of the passionate community who has been a great motivator. So: everybody who helped me and supported the project in all these years (you know who you are and I cannot possibly mention everybody) — thank you!

How are supported applications chosen for Adblock Plus? · 2010-02-11 19:30 by Wladimir Palant

It is time to formalize how I choose which applications/application versions to support in Adblock Plus. There are several categories here:

Applications with very high user numbers (particularly with high numbers of users testing Adblock Plus development builds): that’s currently only Firefox. Supporting multiple application versions is possible, bugs will usually be caught by the community before an Adblock Plus release. Still, once a Firefox version gets close to end-of-life (Mozilla will no longer ship security updates) its user numbers drop considerably and it gets harder to get Adblock Plus properly tested there. Which is one reason why I am targeting mostly the versions supported by Mozilla (currently Firefox 3.5 and 3.6) and drop support for outdated versions eventually (Firefox 3.0 support is currently being phased out).

About.com Reader's Choice Awards - Adblock Plus needs your vote! · 2010-02-02 10:00 by Wladimir Palant

Don’t have enough polls to participate in? Good news for you: About.com started its Reader’s Choice Awards program and you might know some of the finalists. Now it all depends on your vote. Head over to the poll page, page 4 is particularly interesting — it lists Adblock Plus as one of the finalists in the “Best Overall Add-On” category. You certainly want to go to page 2 as well and vote for Firefox in the “Best Major Desktop Browser” category. If you already had a chance to use Firefox Mobile (Fennec), maybe even with Adblock Plus installed, page 3 is where you can vote for it.

Getting screen coordinates for an HTML element · 2010-01-31 02:27 by Wladimir Palant

Yes, getBoxObjectFor() is deprecated, we all know that. And there is getBoundingClientRect() now which is much better anyway. But what should I do if I need the screen coordinates of an HTML element? getBoundingClientRect() won’t provide them and translating doesn’t seem possible (window.screenX is not the screen position of the window’s client area). Google found only a newsgroup discussion yet I already knew that popups can be positioned relative to a node automatically. I need to update the position of a popup that is already open and there doesn’t seem a way to realign the popup with its anchor node without closing it (at least not in Firefox 3.5).