Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Status Update: 2010-08-20 · 2010-08-20 18:56 by Wladimir Palant

I’ll try to publish these status updates at the end of each week — this is mainly a way for me to organize my work but it might also prove useful to somebody who wants to track Adblock Plus work. If you are annoyed by them — these will always appear in the “progress” category, many RSS feed readers allow filtering by post category. I’ll also explicitly not post these in the “adblock plus” category.

Done

• Caught up with the mail after vacation
• Fixed regressions introduced by Firefox 4 development
• Released Adblock Plus 1.2.2 from 1.2.x branch to allow using stable release with Firefox 4 betas/nightlies
• Mediated morphing of RuAdList into an EasyList supplement

In progress

• Simpler way to attach data to nodes — performance gains and code simplification are significant but the required changes are also more than I expected.
• Setting up a blog for EasyList — looks like setting up LifeType is easier than restricting TextPattern enough to make a non-privileged user its administrator. If LifeType works out for EasyList this blog will eventually be migrated as well.

Next

• Finish migrating website to Anwiki
• Change handling of externally maintained subscriptions
• Update public interface documentation for Adblock Plus 1.3, the new way to get to Adblock Plus seems stable
• Improve subscription downloads for a more equal distribution

Tags: progress

Comment [8]

1. ButterflyOfFire · 2010-08-20 19:47 · #

   Thanks :)

2. xyz · 2010-08-20 20:40 · #

   # Change handling of externally maintained subscriptions

   what exactly does this mean?

   # Setting up a blog for EasyList — looks like setting up LifeType is easier than restricting TextPattern enough to make a non-privileged user its administrator. If LifeType works out for EasyList this blog will eventually be migrated as well.

   Why not wordpress?

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   You can find more info about most development tasks on the roadmap: https://adblockplus.org/en/roadmap. Not that many people would care about that particular item: subscriptions maintained by other extensions are pretty rare, the most prominent example was Filterset.G.

   I need a blog that is simple enough to make adjustments to and built with security in mind. My understanding is that Wordpress is neither. Textpattern is pretty good as long as it is being run by the server admin – but once other people get access to the administration interface securing it gets hairy.

3. Marijo · 2010-08-21 14:10 · #

   I’m definitely not annoyed by the status updates. This way it’s much easier to follow the development process than checking the roadmap, forums, and whatnot.

   Thanks! :)

4. MCExorzist · 2010-08-21 14:44 · #

   This is the best and important Add-on for Firefox, simply thanx for the great update!

5. MrG · 2010-08-22 04:29 · #

   Thanks for all your hard work!

6. fanboy · 2010-08-23 03:18 · #

   “Mediated morphing of RuAdList into an EasyList supplement”, really should wait till the RuAdlist is optimised, as it stands the RuAdlist filter is slow and very unoptimised.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Why do you say that? I did run the matching performance test – EasyList plain takes 64ms, RuAdList+EasyList combination 66ms. So the difference is minimal, probably mostly accounted to the one regular expression RuAdList has.

   Otherwise – this was the decision of the subscription maintainer, I really only helped ensuring that the switch goes smooth for existing users.

7. fanboy · 2010-08-23 14:18 · #

   Not sure if the “performance test” picks up all the elements, huge variety of selectors, some are 10+ deep! surely not optimised as it could be.

   The list should/should’ve been cleaned up before being accepted, but that’s my opinion.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Yes, some Russian web sites are very badly designed and these element hiding expressions are pretty much the only choice. This is less of a performance issue, the problem is mostly false positives. But that is a persistent issue with RuAdList and something that is improving slowly. If you have suggestions on what could be changed I would be glad to see them in the RuAdList forum topic (I’ve seen that you posted there before).

   I’m not sure what you think happened last week but RuAdList has been a recommendation “on probation” for quite a while already, ever since Morpeh’s list ceased to exist. To date it is by far the best Russian-language list available and very well-supported (no offense but you seem to get almost no feedback on your list – far less than RuAdList even back when it wasn’t a recommendation). The way things are going it will stay recommended. The change last week was a purely technical one – many people seem to use RuAdList and EasyList together so the maintainer decided to change it into an official EasyList supplement. Which usually wouldn’t even require my attention but RuAdList maintainer doesn’t seem to be comfortable with English – ouch…

8. beto · 2010-08-29 20:29 · #

   Are there any plans for this item in the roadmap for ABP v1.3?

   # Give an easy way to report issues to subscription maintainers

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   Yes, it is the next thing on my list.

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