Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Sorry Filterset.G but it is time for you to go · 2006-11-23 18:05 by Wladimir Palant
The issues with Filterset.G have been discussed several times in the forums and now it is official — I recommend Adblock Plus users to uninstall Filterset.G Updater and use some other subscription instead.
What happened to the promised spam solution? · 2006-11-23 17:35 by Wladimir Palant
Do you still remember? Sometime in the beginning of year 2004 Bill Gates promised us to take care of the spam problem by 2006. It was big in the news all over the world.
Hit counts for element hiding revisited · 2006-11-21 17:48 by Wladimir Palant
I was finally able to come up with a working (yet not exactly simple) scheme to implement hit counts for element hiding. It can also be used to show hidden elements in the sidebar and maybe even make element hiding rules respect whitelisting. There are two disadvantages however:
It is good to be right - we are No. 1! · 2006-11-21 12:29 by Wladimir Palant
December last year I had a discussion with rue, maintainer of the original Adblock extension. We were talking about the the necessity of major changes, and I was trying to convince him that these changes are long overdue. At some point rue proudly proclaimed something like: “We stayed in the Top5 for the last year — not bad considering we didn’t have any changes at all”. My answer was: “That’s not an achievement, this project has the potential to be No. 1”. And there we are, less than a year later — Adblock Plus is now the most popular extension on Addons.Mozilla.Org. It is good to be right, I knew it was possible!