Adblock Plus and (a little) more
The biggest Plus around · 2007-01-08 11:03 by Wladimir Palant
There are always interesting things to find in the server logs. This time I noticed that a few people coming to adblockplus.org were searching for “plus.de”. I tried it and – wow, Adblock Plus is the second search result after the actual plus.de. And if you only search for plus Adblock Plus comes up on the places 22 (AMO) and 36 (adblockplus.org), for such a generic term this isn’t bad either.
Firefox security: the real picture · 2007-01-05 12:37 by Wladimir Palant
I have seen many people complaining about how Firefox is no more secure than Internet Explorer. Usually this impression comes up when people read the long lists of security bugs fixed with every maintenance release. Since I have reported a few security bugs myself and could observe how Mozilla deals with those, I knew well that Firefox is still incomparably more secure than Internet Explorer — and now there is proof. Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006 has the data.
Adblock Plus on the crossroads · 2006-12-21 15:09 by Wladimir Palant
Now that Adblock Plus has reached a certain level of maturity and made it to rank 1 by downloads on AMO, there is a question about how it should be developed further. Incremental improvements will continue of course, there are still nice things to be added (the ability to unblock immediately above all). But Adblock Plus has reached a point where it already has most of the features that the general public needs. Most new features will become available as separate extensions.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 and impact on addon downloads · 2006-12-21 01:30 by Wladimir Palant
I am looking at the development of addon downloads on Addons.Mozilla.Org for the last few days and I really have trouble understanding it:
Looking for a job again · 2006-12-20 13:15 by Wladimir Palant
I should be finished with my PhD in May. What should I do once I am done? This question is bugging me right now. These three years have made it very clear that I don’t want to continue an academic career. I want to produce good software that will be used by real people, and sadly this is simply unrealistic being at a university.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 is out - yay! · 2006-12-20 11:17 by Wladimir Palant
Firefox 2.0.0.1 has just been released. Please upgrade as soon as possible, it fixes a bad JavaScript bug in Firefox 2.0 that caused all sorts of strange effects especially when Adblock Plus was installed (bug 355161). In particular this fixes the incompatibility between Adblock Plus and the Google Notebook extension and probably a number of other issues that couldn’t be tracked down properly.
Spell checker rants · 2006-12-11 14:21 by Wladimir Palant
The spell checker in Firefox 2 is certainly a great feature. I have already seen lots of people write this and I agree. And yet, it has some certain deficiencies that make me use it far less than it could be. The reason is: it seems to assume that you always write your texts in the same language. Yet I am frequently switching between languages, I write texts in English, German and Russian all the time. And going to the context menu, digging into the languages menu and choosing the right language is just annoying, especially for a short text. There is also another issue: switching languages takes a while, and for a huge dictionary like the German (10 MB) it becomes a major annoyance.
Adblock Plus internals documented · 2006-12-04 18:57 by Wladimir Palant
I finally came to extending the Adblock Plus internals section of the FAQ. So if you need an explanation about which filters are faster and why or how often Adblock Plus really downloads subscriptions — that’s where you look. It also explains how blocking of addresses or element hiding work internally and gives some tips for extension developers.
Ethics of blocking ads - Part 3 · 2006-12-04 12:50 by Wladimir Palant
This article continues the discussion on ethical implications of ad blocking software. The first part and the second part were mostly dedicated to ads as a business model, now we want to look at the ads as part of the customer relationship.
No good deed goes unpunished · 2006-12-04 00:19 by Wladimir Palant
I started a little experiment — downloaded all extensions from addons.mozilla.org (AMO), unpacked them and tried to find security holes by searching for specific strings. As expected, it wasn’t all too difficult, one can easily find a dozen vulnerable extensions in an hour, and that not even accounting for the fact that there is a certain unpopular class of extensions on AMO all sharing the same buggy code. The only reason I didn’t hit all too many high profile extensions was that I was going through the extensions in alphabetical order instead of going by popularity.