Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
adblockplus.org - now with SSL protection · 2009-06-26 13:47 by Wladimir Palant
I enabled SSL on adblockplus.org and easylist.adblockplus.org so that these can be accessed via a secure connection. I also checked that all pages keep you on an encrypted connection once you are there (if you get redirected from HTTPS to plain HTTP somewhere — let me know). Only known problem is the video on the main page (embedding YouTube via SSL doesn’t seem possible) and images in forum posts (these typically come from plain HTTP as well). Oh, and I am using a StartCom certificate which means that only Gecko-based browsers and Safari will recognize it (given the audience of this site, this shouldn’t be a problem).
Selecting countries on a map in Firefox 3.5 · 2009-06-20 12:18 by Wladimir Palant
Since everybody is talking about Firefox 3.5 demos these days I though that I would dig up one that I created myself in November. It allows selecting areas of complex shape on an image — e.g. countries on a map. This idea didn’t end up being used for anything but somebody else might find it useful.
Ten years ago I already had to solve this problem. How do you present the user with a map and let him choose a country? Back then I ended up using Win32 API and two bitmaps — one to display to the user and a second invisible bitmap to let the application translate clicks into actual countries by checking the color corresponding to the click position. The visible bitmap was static meaning that it wasn’t possible to show the selected country on the map. But that wasn’t necessary anyway back then. And now I had to solve the same problem, this time for the Mozilla platform.
Adding Weave support to an extension · 2009-06-01 14:00 by Wladimir Palant
Weave is a pretty cool extension, it lets you sync your Firefox/Fennec data (history, bookmarks etc.) across multiple computers via some server — and that while the browser is running, no need to restart it. So for example, you might have Fennec running on a Pocket PC and Firefox on your desktop, both logged into the same Weave account. You add a bookmark in Firefox. On next sync (which you can trigger manually) this change will be uploaded to the server. And next time Fennec syncs this bookmark will simply appear in your bookmarks list while the browser is running. Weave works with single bookmarks rather than taking the list as a whole meaning that this update will not affect the other bookmark changes you’ve performed in Fennec in the meantime (those will simply be uploaded to the server so that Firefox can get them on next sync). Add to this encryption, all data is being encrypted locally before being sent to the server — so while the server can tell how many bookmarks you have, it won’t be able to read the actual data. Still, if you don’t trust Mozilla’s server you can run your own without much trouble.
An approach to fair ad blocking - Feedback summary · 2009-05-13 15:41 by Wladimir Palant
I got more than 200 comments in two days to my controversial proposal to occasionally suggest Adblock Plus users to whitelist frequently visited sites. Given that it was a lengthy text and many users came from sites that “compressed” it, the feedback was surprisingly useful (and only few people accusing me of deciding everything without asking users on a blog post that asks users for their opinions). I will try to summarize the important results: