Adblock Plus and (a little) more
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.
Unfortunately, with Firefox 3 also came a flood of new issue reports that I couldn’t deal with — all reports referred to different web sites, different symptoms, even different plugins. I didn’t have the time to investigate each of those and create testcases, and there was no way I could determine which of the reported problems were caused by the same issue (and most of them certainly were). The guys at Adobe felt the pain as well and actually managed to find the issue causing all this. And Johnny Stenback fixed it (many thanks for that). That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Johnny’s patch caused two regressions. One of those has been resolved, the other — not yet. Which means that his patch has been backed out and won’t be in Firefox 3.0.2. And that in turn means that for at least one more month the only thing I can tell users reporting issues like Flash videos not playing, Flash-based sites being broken, Flex debugger not working etc. etc. — “Sorry, your problem is probably caused by bug 438830 but I don’t have the time to check whether it is. Please wait for the next Firefox release and come back to me if it isn’t fixed there.”
Comment [9]
Commenting is closed for this article.
asshole · 2008-08-27 17:34 · #
I’ve had many problems with Flash, but never thought to hassle you about it.
Stefan Constantinescu · 2008-09-01 15:34 · #
Just wanted to say that AdBlock doesn’t work with today’s Nightly release of FF.
3.1b1pre
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Thanks for letting me know, I updated the compatibility info on addons.mozilla.org.
Porosyatko · 2008-09-02 06:03 · #
А будет версия расширения для Google Chrome?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Если он сделан на базе Gecko – может быть. Но что-то не сильно похоже.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Нашел, что используется WebKit. Значит нет.
Bruce G. · 2008-09-03 00:57 · #
PLEAAAASE version for Google Chrome!! pozhalostya :)
btw, google says it is based on BOTH gecko AND webkit (whatever that means)…
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
No, it is not based on Gecko (though they thank Firefox for some inspiration) – it is all WebKit. Nothing I can do about it. Maybe one of the Safari ad blockers can be ported.
Wraith · 2008-09-06 06:38 · #
Just wanted to let you know something very critical with your addon.
I’m using Firefox v3.0.1, the official ‘stable’ build directly from the main Firefox page at Mozilla.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
I installed Adblock Plus (latest version) 0.7.5.5 from
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
Your website only has 0.7.5.4
After installing Adblock Plus, I went to subscriptions and there were several of them. I went to this website
http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions
Some of the subscriptions had the following note, so I avoided those:
Note: This list is not fully optimized for Adblock Plus and may slow down your browsing.
There is one called ‘Malware Domains’ with this homepage
http://malwaredomains.com/
I install that subscription under Firefox 3 and I regret doing so, I had to completely reinstall my browser because of what it did. Not only was there the expected delay on startup/shutdown, but my browser would freeze and crash after about 10 mins of browsing, no matter what I did. It would just randomly freeze for about 30 seconds, then run normally, then freeze for a bit longer, and keep doing this (almost like virus/malware) until the browser crashed. When I reinstalled everything was fine, and I narrowed it down to this subscription messes up Firefox and causes massive delays.
So please put an additional warning about using it, or remove it altogether.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Many people (including myself) use this subscription without any such issues – so it would be more helpful if you asked in the forum (no registration required) where we could find out what is really causing the issues. Posting something like this in my blog without even giving a contact address is pointless.
PS: I think you ignored another warning on the subscription page – the one telling you that you shouldn’t install more filter subscriptions than you really need.
Stephen · 2008-09-12 17:35 · #
Thanks for the heads up! Seeing the “bigger picture” of all the pieces to the puzzle helps explain the situation.
All the best, keep up the great work!
Steve
Peter Kozzy · 2008-10-05 19:03 · #
I am using Firefox 3.0.3 and Adblock plus works beautifully.
Has not missed a beat!
I was wondering however, is there a way of blocking the annoying Flash advertising? Right clicking on the ad, doesn’t give me any options. Any suggestions?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
See http://adblockplus.org/en/faq_basics#objects
Christian · 2008-10-06 16:14 · #
Hi,
First I want to thank you for your good work on adblock plus.
Unfortunately Adblock plus does not work with the latest (nightly) builds of Seamonkey (Mozilla) because the build version has changed.
Trying to (re)install Adblock plus ends up with the error message “Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5 could not be installed because it is not compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0a2pre.”.
Please make Adblock plus work again.
Thanks.
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
I changed compatibility info, we now officially support SeaMonkey 2.0a2. Clicking “Find updates” in the add-ons dialog should do the trick for you.
Artur · 2008-10-17 07:51 · #
Your plugin works good but it have problems with sidebar extensions. In this sidebar extension I load a java applet. After install your plugin it forbidden to load my applet. Set www.globallinx.de to not filtering area or deactivate the plugin doesn’t help. Only if I deinstall your plugin I can connect to my www.globallinx.de server and load my applet again. I think your plugin filtering the whole firefox but the disabled function work only in the main frame but not in sidebar extensions.
greetings
Artur