Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Creating quality software · 2008-09-13 15:56 by Wladimir Palant

It got quiet around Adblock Plus again after some great strides towards Adblock Plus 0.8. That doesn’t mean however that nothing is happening, on the contrary. However, when I was about to add another small user interface change (one of the few that are still due for 0.8 release), I noticed that this is way more complicated than it should be. Why?

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Filtering HTML code in Adblock Plus · 2008-09-11 18:54 by Wladimir Palant

Henrik Gemal blogged about a new feature in Firefox, extensions can now inspect and modify the response of HTTP requests before it gets to the sender. And the best news is, it is coming to Firefox 3.0.3 as well, so extension developers don’t need to wait a year before this feature can be used. Obviously, Firebug and Firekeeper developers want this — the former to display the response, the latter to prevent a malicious response from ever reaching the sender. However, it could be useful for Adblock Plus as well.

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Don't bother reporting your plugin issues to me · 2008-08-27 12:18 by Wladimir Palant

Adblock Plus is based on content policies, and content policies don’t get along with plugins too well — so I am used to dealing with plugin issues that are regularly reported as bugs in Adblock Plus. Typically, in those cases I try to reproduce the issue, create minimized testcases and report the problem at bugzilla.mozilla.org (if there is no such report already of course). Finding the actual source of the problem and fixing it would require more time than I can spend but thanks to Boris Zbarsky and Johnny Stenback this still didn’t work out too bad, all the issues I am aware of have been fixed in Firefox 3.

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And who comes to visit your web site? · 2008-08-07 01:49 by Wladimir Palant

I often see people complaining that the page impressions on their site don’t match their ad impressions. Apparently, a large percentage of their visitors (you see numbers like 50% mentioned) don’t see their ads. And it is easy enough to find the guilty party — ad blocking software. The enemy is found, the world makes sense again, and the energy can be spent on solving the “issue”.

Only that something doesn’t make sense: judging by numbers of active daily users, no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed. And I doubt that other ad blockers have a significantly larger user base.

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Using XULRunner platform · 2008-07-15 11:24 by Wladimir Palant

It is now more than a year that I started working on TomTom HOME, an application to manage personal navigation devices. The original version of this application (TomTom HOME 1.x) was written entirely in C++ and used wxWidgets library. After some time it became an unmaintainable mess, and a decision was made that a better platform for user interface development is necessary. I wasn’t around when XULRunner was chosen as this platform but I am happy that it was — that’s how I came aboard, two months before the first release of TomTom HOME 2. Now we are closing in on a fifth major release, and it is time to summarize how XULRunner did as a platform.

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Reconfiguring CheckPoint VPN-1 to allow FTPS connections · 2008-07-13 17:05 by Wladimir Palant

I recently tried using FTPS (SSL-encrypted FTP) and noticed that it didn’t work, immediately after “AUTH TLS” command the connection was disconnected. That happened independently of the server I tried to connect to and the server wasn’t aware of any disconnect. I am posting the solution here since more people might be affected by this.

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Blocking malicious sites with Adblock Plus · 2008-07-03 11:48 by Wladimir Palant

I was reading about yet another wave of attacks exploiting a Flash vulnerability. It turned out that the Flash vulnerability used was already fixed but that doesn’t really matter — Adobe seems incapable of updating users to a secure Flash version in a timely fashion. So Firefox users were at risk here as well, and the continuing waves of SQL Injection attacks inserting malicious iframes into trusted websites didn’t exactly make the situation better.

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Users with add-ons much more likely to upgrade? · 2008-07-02 14:00 by Wladimir Palant

Henrik Gemal posted on current Firefox market share. Apparently, current Net Applications figures say that only 24% of all Firefox users already switched to Firefox 3. Interestingly, the percentage amongst Adblock Plus users seems much higher. The numbers on addons.mozilla.org indicate 43% Firefox 3 users. This is confirmed by the numbers from popular filter subscriptions, e.g. 43% of EasyList users (largely US-based) and more than 45% of “Cedrics Liste” users (mostly German) are already using Firefox 3.

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Emulating Window.openDialog with JavaScript arguments in an XPCOM component · 2008-07-02 13:27 by Wladimir Palant

Opening a XUL dialog from JavaScript is usually easy, you use Window.openDialog method that is almost the same as Window.open but also accepts some parameters that the dialog will be able to access via Window.arguments collection. But what if your JavaScript code runs inside an XPCOM component doesn’t have a window? Still not very hard, you use nsIWindowWatcher.openWindow method then. The tricky part here is passing parameters to the dialog however. I had to resort to hacks here in the past, and other people seem to have issues with that as well, so I thought I would share the solution.

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Yes, that's how you do it · 2008-06-20 18:28 by Wladimir Palant

Just read this article on The Daily WTF. Yes, that’s how you do it if you care about your readers and their impression of your site. I am not usually blocking Google Ads but I had to add a filter specifically for The Daily WTF to block Google’s image ads. I guess I can take that filter out again. Now if they would only get rid of animated ads altogether, I would disable Adblock Plus on that site.

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