Adblock Plus and (a little) more
AMO getting serious about add-on security · 2009-11-14 15:36 by Wladimir Palant
Good news: AMO is finally getting serious about improving security of add-ons. Several bugs that I filed almost a year ago and didn’t have time to follow up on have suddenly seen some movement, even to the point of setting a two weeks deadline to resolve the security issues (thanks, Jorge). Sure, this approach won’t make you new friends and one add-on author preferred to remove his add-ons rather than fix them. But it is really overdue to start enforcing policies.
SeaMonkey 2.0 is finally out! · 2009-10-27 15:07 by Wladimir Palant
Anybody complaining about “Install script not found” error when installing Adblock Plus — there is finally a stable SeaMonkey version where you can install Adblock Plus. SeaMonkey 2.0 is out, go get it!
Atomic orbital viewer with WebGL · 2009-10-04 17:19 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I found an application that I wrote more than 10 years ago — atomic orbital viewer. Back then I got interested in the pictures of atomic orbitals you get presented in chemistry class, found the special-case formulas for electron distribution and generalized them. And then I wrote an application to visualize these orbitals. Since I didn’t have access to 3D hardware or even literature on 3D graphics I ended up reinventing everything — yes, I used to have that kind of time back then. What came out was a Turbo Pascal (DOS) application where I’ve written almost everything myself, including low-level mouse handling and GUI library.
New job again · 2009-09-02 20:46 by Wladimir Palant
In case somebody noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet recently — many things happened which kept me occupied. In particular, I started a new job yesterday and will now be developing Songbird. I have been following Songbird’s development since the very beginning and even managed to develop one of the first third-party add-ons for it. It is a very interesting project and a great development team so I am really excited about this.
Downloading Xenocode's "sandboxed" applications · 2009-08-28 18:29 by Wladimir Palant
A while ago there was an announcement that the company Xenocode was providing virtualized versions of applications, particularly browsers. While what they provide isn’t real sandboxes (the applications that you run there can still write files to the disk, e.g. if you download something from the web) it is still an easy way of running browsers without having to install them — Xenocode makes sure that from application’s point of view everything that should be there after installation is there. In particular, you can run Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 on the same machine at the same time — no need for complicated registry hacks. Of course, this should only be used for testing websites that are safe, you won’t get security updates for these Internet Explorer instances.
To anybody using Firefox 2.0 or Adblock Plus 1.0.2 - it is time to upgrade · 2009-08-27 22:05 by Wladimir Palant
According to AMO statistics, there is still a considerable number of people using Adblock Plus 1.0.2 or older (around 20% of the entire user base). While there might be different reasons for that (most important one probably being the fact that current Adblock Plus versions don’t support Firefox 2), if you are one of them then I have news for you: it is time to upgrade. Seriously. Go get Adblock Plus 1.1.1 now. If you are still using Firefox 2 — go get Firefox 3.5.
The return of .NET Framework Assistant · 2009-08-10 11:34 by Wladimir Palant
Do you remember the commotion about Microsoft silently installing its .NET Framework Assistant extension through Windows Update? And how everybody was upset about this being forced down their throats, even without an “Uninstall” button in the add-ons window? And how Microsoft fixed at least the "Uninstall" button? And how that fix broke Adblock Plus and NoScript temporarily, causing tons of complains for both extensions? Well, the show isn’t over yet, lean back and watch.
Seth Godin on marketing · 2009-08-04 20:53 by Wladimir Palant
Joel Spolsky tipped me off on this highly interesting talk by Seth Godin. It is a full hour of video but it is well worth watching. It has a very convincing analysis of everything that is wrong with the advertising industry today. What’s even more intriguing is his assessment on how the Internet changed things and what good marketing means now (spoiler: it’s not “let’s put our ad in front of as many people as possible”).
Apology to Adblock Plus users - and call for participation · 2009-08-02 23:31 by Wladimir Palant
I messed up, really sorry about that. Some people already noticed that Adblock Plus 1.1 release didn’t have the quality you would usually expect. Right now, it looks like there are something like three distinct regressions of which I can only reproduce one so far. And what is worse, I went on vacation only a few days after the release and didn’t have a chance to properly investigate these issues — even less to fix those. So users who are affected and can no longer use Adblock Plus can only revert to Adblock Plus 1.0.2 for now.
Trying to get rid of "Author not verified" (or: Signing extensions with StartCom certificate) · 2009-07-07 21:47 by Wladimir Palant
Over the past few days I tried to get Adblock Plus builds signed and gave up again. Given that there is fairly little documentation on that topic, I though I would summarize my experience.