Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Fake "hg rebase" implementation · 2008-10-24 11:13 by Wladimir Palant
After doing two merges in Mercurial when I couldn’t push my changes due to totally unrelated changes in the remote repository, I noticed that mq works great but having a fully automated solution instead of running several commands manually would be desirable.
Adblock Plus goes Mercurial · 2008-10-23 14:58 by Wladimir Palant
After all the bigger projects already announced their move from CVS to Mercurial, it is now my turn. A Mercurial code repository for Adblock Plus was created at MozDev yesterday (thanks to Doug for the fast response), and now I am done updating the scripts and instructions on the web.
Generating JavaScript documentation · 2008-10-21 10:05 by Wladimir Palant
After years of neglecting code documentation I finally came around and added JSDoc comments to much of the Adblock Plus core. The next problem now — what tool should I use to extract these comments and generate documentation? Problem is, none of the off-the-shelf tools know JavaScript 1.8.
Dealing with source code in Mercurial · 2008-10-20 13:00 by Wladimir Palant
Dear Lazyweb,
I like it a lot that checking out XULRunner code is a simple hg clone command now rather than a special checkout script — but how do you check out the source code of a specific release?
MAOW presentation slides · 2008-09-22 10:47 by Wladimir Palant
I was invited to give a talk at the Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Paris this weekend so I tried to give people an idea what it takes to maintain an extension project that already got rolling. The presentation went fairly well even though I could have told much more and I had to scrap the slide on security because the time has simply run out. My slides can be viewed here (note that FullerScreen extension messes the slides up badly, as we discovered just before the presentation).
Making modal dialogs work on Mac OS X · 2008-09-15 22:49 by Wladimir Palant
If you ever tried TomTom HOME, you probably noticed that its user interface is “unusual”. It tries to mimic the user interface of a navigation device meaning among others that all messages (“dialogs”) replace the entire window content and require you to dismiss them before you can continue doing whatever you have been doing. There are some advantages to that kind of user interface but it was also a constant source of irritation among our testers (and, no doubt, users). In particular, you could still use the menu despite the dialog, with strange results.
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?
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.
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.
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.