Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Adblock Plus 2.1 release candidate available - restartless edition · 2012-06-23 16:47 by Wladimir Palant
Adblock Plus can finally be installed/disabled/enabled without a browser restart. This feature took much longer to develop than expected and there were a bunch of glitches when it first hit the development builds but most of these seem to be resolved now. So the current development build (Adblock Plus 2.1rc.3495) is a release candidate. Adblock Plus 2.1 is expected to be released on Wednesday (June 27th).
Important changes
- Installing, uninstalling, updating the extension no longer requires you to restart the browser. Note that you will have to restart the browser when updating from a non-restartless version of Adblock Plus.
- Adblock Plus should no longer be affected by misbehaving extensions.
- Better Thunderbird support, Adblock Plus is now usable in tabs displaying web pages as well.
- Added support for Firefox Mobile with native UI (next Firefox Mobile version currently in Beta).
- Made our toolbar/addon bar button more reliable: it will no longer disappear if the toolbar is customized when Adblock Plus is disabled and it will remember its previous position if removed.
- The development builds work reliably in Firefox 15 and above – there were several changes that affected Adblock Plus (especially bug 650353).
- A new filter type has been implemented: element hiding exceptions (forum topic). These are mostly useful for authors of complementary filter subscriptions that need to restrict an overly general filter from the main subscription. Everybody else can just edit the original filter instead.
- Filter subscriptions are automatically updated when reporting a false positive (forum topic).
- Filter subscriptions can set a fixed title for themselves using the
! Titlecomment (forum topic). This also allows us to display subscription titles in bold now. - Filter Preferences: “Enabled” checkboxes have been moved to the left, italics are no longer used for disabled filters (forum topic).
- Filter Preferences: Links in the subscription list now have the same color as the rest of the text to prevent them from being indistinguishable from the background (forum topic).
- The shortcut key for blockable items will be Ctrl-Shift-U in Firefox 15 and above. Sorry but our beloved Ctrl-Shift-V key is otherwise occupied.
- Our custom About dialog is gone, Adblock Plus is using the built-in dialog now.
Known issues
- Package size increased considerably. This is a side-effect of different packaging approach which is recommended starting with Firefox 4 to improve startup performance (no inner JAR file).
- The development builds are no longer signed and neither will be the final release. This is due to bug 765676.
- Firefox Mobile with XUL-based UI (meaning the currently stable Firefox Mobile release) is no longer supported. Unfortunately, it seems to have a bug that will cause random issues when a restartless extension is updated. From what I can tell, we cannot work around it and it is unlikely to be fixed either with this particular Firefox Mobile variant nearing its end of life. You will have to continue using Adblock Plus 2.0.3 here.
- Disabling Adblock Plus extension during a browsing session doesn’t release all memory used by it, some memory remains allocated until you reload all pages that had element hiding rules applied to them. This is unfortunately unavoidable, the effect is rather small however (around 0.5 MB in my tests but might depend on the number of open tabs).
- The “Contribute” button will appear again even if you removed it earlier in a non-restartless Adblock Plus version. Also, the blockable items height will be reset. This is unfortunately unavoidable, these choices have to be stored differently now that the extension is restartless.
- Toolbar icon position is supposed to be kept when updating from a non-restartless Adblock Plus version, there were reports however that it isn’t working. I will look into it, in the meantime just customize the toolbar again and move the icon wherever you would like to have it.
Asynchronous file operations, end of support for old browsers · 2012-04-05 16:28 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0.4b.3443 reading and saving of patterns.ini and elemhide.css files will be asynchronous (meaning that they won’t delay other operations that Firefox or Adblock Plus might need to do). This approach has a bunch of advantages:
- Firefox startup and shutdown will be faster.
- Adblock Plus Preferences will be more responsive, changing something will no longer cause the browser to hang for a split second.
- The inherently unreliable cache.js file is no longer necessary and will not be used.
There are also some drawbacks which is why it took so long to make this decision:
- First browser window might appear before Adblock Plus managed to read its filters. If that happens, the web pages from the restored session (or the homepage) might have ads. This never happened in my testing but it is possible.
- patterns.ini is no longer saved on browser shutdown, some hit count information might get lost because of that (up to 250 hits).
Known issues (should be fixed soon):
- When updating from an earlier Adblock Plus version, the first-run page might open. Your settings will not be changed.
- Writing elemhide.css might fail in some rare scenarios.
In other news, support for anything before Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8 and SeaMonkey 2.5 has been dropped. I started cleaning up our code using the new platform capabilities and will continue doing so. Also, a work-around for the subscription download issue in Firefox 14 has been implemented.
Upcoming and past changes to application compatibility · 2012-03-16 08:02 by Wladimir Palant
Starting with version 2.0 Adblock Plus requires at least Firefox 3.6.13 to be installed (or Thunderbird 3.1.7 or SeaMonkey 2.1). We really don’t support earlier Firefox 3.6 versions because of a critical bug that will cause Flash to break. Unfortunately, this limitation initially couldn’t be enforced by technical means (due to a limitation on addons.mozilla.org) so some people with old Firefox 3.6 versions nevertheless got it installed. If you are one of them: you should update your browser as soon as possible, already because of the numerous known security issues in the old versions.
On the pop-up blocker in Adblock Plus · 2012-02-15 18:33 by Wladimir Palant
There is a semi-hidden new feature in Adblock Plus 2.0: a pop-up blocker. I wanted to explain what this feature is about and why there are no big announcements about it.
The future of Element Hiding Helper · 2012-01-19 12:08 by Wladimir Palant
The Adblock Plus roadmap currently has a bullet point “Integrate Element Hiding Helper into Adblock Plus”. After adding Page Inspector support to Element Hiding Helper today I think that I’m confident about what exactly will be integrated there.
Adblock Plus 2.0.3 released · 2012-01-05 09:54 by Wladimir Palant
- Added a way to disable automatic filter subscription updates by means of a hidden preference.
- Fixed: Blocking from context menu sometimes doesn’t work if the context menu has a submenu.
- Fixed: Tabs on Flash and Java sometimes disappear before they can be clicked.
- Filter Preferences: Fixed the default width of the “Enabled” column.
- Blockable items: Fixed “Disable filter on site” feature.
Adblock Plus 2.0.2 released · 2011-12-21 17:52 by Wladimir Palant
- Improved texts describing “non-intrusive ads” feature.
- Made toolbar icon properly customizable in Thunderbird.
- Fixed: Filter editing is broken in Firefox 3.6.
- Firefox Mobile: Fixed user interface to handle “non-intrusive ads” feature properly.
Adblock Plus 2.0.1 released · 2011-12-14 11:57 by Wladimir Palant
This release is fixing a few minor issues compared to Adblock Plus 2.0. Main reason for the release is a change to the compatibility information.
Adblock Plus 2.0 released · 2011-12-13 16:59 by Wladimir Palant
Major changes
- Experimental pop-up blocking support for the cases where the built-in pop-up blocker fails.
- New Filter Preferences dialog makes managing filters and subscriptions easier.
- Custom filters can be organized into any number of filter groups.
- Backup and Restore functionality allows creating a copy of all filter preferences, not just custom filters.
- Added “Allow non-intrusive advertising” setting (can be changed in Filter Preferences, documentation).
Please welcome our first employee: Andrey Novikov · 2011-12-09 21:11 by Wladimir Palant
A few months ago I explained why we changed our policy on donations. This worked out and we were able to hire our first employee: Andrey Novikov. Andrey comes from a web development and server administration background, he is also the developer of the Androzic app for Android-based mobile phones. For now he is working on Adblock Plus for Chrome and already added proper recognition of third-party domains (something that only few people will notice but nevertheless important to bring our Chrome extension on par with the Firefox version). Next task on his list: porting user interface from Adblock Plus for Firefox to Chrome.