Adblock Plus and (a little) more
An approach to fair ad blocking · 2009-05-11 18:04 by Wladimir Palant
As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. In the end, the Internet does need money to run and ads are still the most universal way to distribute that money. The only problem is that ads are becoming increasingly intrusive and annoying as webmasters try to maximize their profits which is the main reason people install Adblock Plus. So the idea is to give control back to the users by allowing them to block annoying ads. Since the non-intrusive ads would be blocked less often it would encourage webmasters to use such ads, balance restored.
Extension update patterns · 2009-05-06 15:36 by Wladimir Palant
I recently released Adblock Plus 1.0.2 to fix a regression that would affect any user upgrading to Firefox 3.0.9. In the end, Adblock Plus upgrade was released only six days before Firefox 3.0.9 and the big question is of course — was that enough time? How many users ended up using the new Firefox release with an outdated Adblock Plus version?
Attention NoScript users · 2009-05-01 22:54 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make its money from ads. And to make sure that somebody sees these ads it goes pretty far. For example, it opens the changelog webpage (full of ads of course) on every single update of the extension, even though the NoScript FAQ claim that it happens only on major updates (yes, if you dig into it you will find the preference to disable this behavior – but how many people do that?). And updates coming roughly each week ensure that this page is opened fairly often.
What is going on with EasyList · 2009-04-07 13:06 by Wladimir Palant
EasyList development has to continue, despite the sad events. Many of you already know Ares2, he is a very active (and helpful) member of both EasyList and Adblock Plus forums. He has been maintaining a German complementary subscription for EasyList and Rick was speaking highly of his work. I asked Ares2 to take over EasyList maintenance and I am glad to announce that he accepted.
Sad news · 2009-04-06 14:06 by Wladimir Palant
I got very sad news on Saturday. My friend and long-time Adblock Plus contributor Rick Petnel passed away Friday night. I was informed about his illness two weeks ago but simply refused to believe that it might end like that. Sadly, there is no way of denying it any more.
The monetization dilemma · 2009-03-25 13:02 by Wladimir Palant
There has been a fair amount of discussion lately on the topic of earning money with extensions. Yesterday I read Kent James’ blog post – and only a few minutes later I noticed yet another mail titled “Commercial offer” in my inbox. Now these are typically about some crazy business model they need my help with, usually something along the lines of replacing ads with other ads and redirecting website’s income into your own pocket by doing that. Not this time. An employee of a search engine company suggested I add a checkbox to the post-install Adblock Plus page which will add their search engine to Firefox and change user’s homepage to their entry page (all that restricted to the country where they operate). And they would pay me for each change performed of course.
Adblock Plus screencast online · 2009-03-13 16:02 by Wladimir Palant
Ian Ozsvald and Richard Mitchelson from ProCasts offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable:
Hidden cost of (not) using Venkman · 2009-03-12 19:12 by Wladimir Palant
I came across a Venkman “feature” that was so unexpected that I even filed a JavaScript engine bug on it. Only after Gijs Kruitbosch asked me to test with a clean profile I realized that the JavaScript performance issue I was seeing wasn’t inherent to Firefox but rather something the Venkman extension was responsible for. That’s right, Venkman is degrading JavaScript performance just by being installed, even if you don’t use it. I had Venkman installed “just in case” and this was a big surprise to me.
Mixing absolute and relative lengths in SVG clip paths · 2009-03-12 12:14 by Wladimir Palant
A supposedly simple task turned out to be pretty hard and now I am left guessing whether I am dealing with an SVG spec issue or with a Gecko bug. I need to make corners of a XUL element transparent, something that should be easy if you apply SVG effects to it.
Getting rid of Flash cookies · 2009-03-02 12:57 by Wladimir Palant
Pretty much every Flash movie on the web today uses Flash Player’s global storage feature to store data on your disk, similar to regular browser cookies. What makes this feature so problematic is the lack of proper control mechanisms. For example, for browser cookies I selected “Keep until I close Firefox” which makes sure that cookies can be set (no site functionality is broken) but won’t survive too long. But this setting won’t apply to Flash data. Same goes for the Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.1, it has absolutely no effect on Flash. Note also that Flash data is the same for all browsers and all profiles.